Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part I
Aug. 14th, 2023 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingAs usual with a first post for a game where I'm doing something weird, I think I have to introduce this one somewhat. Once again, we'll be using a rom hack (enabled by FF4kster) to play this game using the traditional, tropey party of knight, thief, white mage, and black mage. Mostly in 2017, I did the analysis related to this - the original analyses for various Final Fantasy games were sort of a continuous blob of spreadsheets - and came up with equipment permissions and a stat breakdown that would resemble these classes in this game.
To put it short, the knight is a lot like paladin Cecil. The white mage and black mage are a lot like Porom and Palom, respectfully, and perhaps that's obvious. The thief, however, is the main thing that's new and different. This game has no thief; the thiefiest functions, like this game's Steal command, were given to Edge the ninja, and Edge is definitely spec'd out as a ninja with good attack power, dual-wielding enabled, a Throw command and some useful ninja techniques as spells. Edge is no thief!
Based on values across all of this game's characters/classes, I gave the thief average attack power, intelligence and survivability, below-average spirit, and game-highest speed. I also added a small number of thief weapons (knives and boomerangs) with stats directly from actual FF4 successors (Final Fantasy IV Advance and Final Fantasy IV The After Years) to ensure their balance wasn't completely out of left field. This was done because there are only 3 knives and 2 boomerangs in the entire game, every single one of which would be way too strong for the early game and way too weak for the late game.
Despite the thief's newness, it's not the only thing that makes this novel. This game has a 5-person party allowance that is used through the majority of gameplay, for one thing, and we'll have just four party members. As well, we are completely ignoring several features we'd normally have access to because of the classes/characters we don't have, the most noteworthy of which is probably summoning magic.
I opted to build this on top of the well known Namingway Editon hack, which is itself a fork of the maybe even more well known Project II hack. This restores FF4's features from its Japanese release, adds a small number of unintrusive quality-of-life features, and modifies the translation slightly to conform better to other, more modern entries in the Final Fantasy series.
This is a personal hack, and I didn't want to spoil it for myself as odd as that sounds, so it's barely playtested. I guess this is the playtest, although it's not really intended for widespread release.
Due to the introduction, prologue, and um... other factors... the real gameplay where we can view the actual party doesn't begin until roughly the 10-minute mark of the video. Instantly apparent is the strange balance of vanilla Final Fantasy IV, where Cecil and Kain start out as rather strong level 10 characters, whereas I'm starting with level 1 characters. The only real level 1 character a normal player would ever normally see (Paladin Cecil doesn't count!) is little Rydia, and she's rather delicate at level 1. Well, we're all that way!
Even the normal battles with FloatEyes and Helldivers are somewhat tough at the very beginning. That said, we level up pretty quickly.
I fought random enemies outside of Baron before entering the Mist Cavern at level 5, and we fought the Mist Dragon at level 6. The battle with the Mist Dragon, which you normally do with Cecil and Kain reasonably quickly at level 10, took my team roughly 6 minutes. This was entirely because of our terrible capacity to deal damage: we have lower attack, lower multipliers, no darkness element weapon, and magic is extremely ineffective against it. Its offense wasn't too scary at all; I triggered its counter once and I was worried about it, but it ended up being no big deal. Porom's Pray ability was entirely able to provide all of the healing we needed. Thief was dealing ~18 damage per turn and Cecil was doing 40-50. Pretty lame compared to vanilla!
I hadn't mentioned yet that the character slot that Thief is replacing happens to be child Rydia. I don't recall exactly why I settled on that. It doesn't matter much at all in terms of mechanics but it does cause some pretty silly cutscenes and such.
We went to Kaipo, where we were able to get Thief a minor weapon upgrade (from Knife to Dagger) and progress the event triggers.
I also was able to observe that character swapping with the L and R buttons doesn't seem to work very well with these uninitialized characters.
The Waterway felt slower than usual without our rather strong Cecil. Palom was able to end most battles with a well-placed Thunder or Blizzard spell, depending on the enemies. We were also able to get the usual treasure, like the Ice Rod. The second dark knight sword for Cecil was replaced with a Long Sword so that was a bit of an upgrade for him, but none of the dark knight-specific armor was usable by this team.
The Octomamm battle seemed a bit more manageable than the Mist Dragon, oddly. Cecil and Thief were a bit more consistent with damage, and Palom even more so especially after Boasting a couple of times. It would seem - and this is reinforced by a comment I got from roymerkel8008 on YouTube - Octomamm's script is based around doing a specific number of hits, represented by the number of tentacles. Given you'd normally have Cecil, Tellah and Rydia with their specific abilities most people probably experience this battle close to the same way, but it's a bit different for my unusual group.
When we got to Damcyan, we raided the treasure and the cutscenes played out maybe somewhat differently but without error. My favourite part was when Edward left as a normal person and then walked back in to say goodbye to Anna as a mini-person for some reason.
We did the Antlion's Cave before wrapping up. It started slow, but as my characters crept over level 11 things started to change kind of quickly. The "curve" of stats based on my analysis is largely based around increments of 10 levels, so there's a bit of a power jump there. It should be noted that this curve exists in the base game too, where levels between 1-10 are a small difference, 10-20 is pretty big, 20-50 are huge, 50-60 are pretty big, and 60-70 are small again. There's a big "bulge" in the middle, and with that we see these increases starting to matter more right at level 11. Each level was bringing bigger benefits, most obviously with HP.
Palom also learned Blizzara, which we really put to work against the Antlion. I wanted to use spells to avoid Antlion's strong counters. Palom used Boast three times and then used Blizzara for 1302 damage, ending the fight rather quickly.
We walked out, and returned to Kaipo. Now, unfortunately, I didn't save outside Kaipo and the battle where Edward would normally fight the Seahag/Sahagin crashed the game. I decided this was an okay time to stop!
I guess next time I play, I will be re-doing the Antlion's Den, since unfortunately I saved before that. Naturally we'll dance around that bug somehow.
Index | Next >
To put it short, the knight is a lot like paladin Cecil. The white mage and black mage are a lot like Porom and Palom, respectfully, and perhaps that's obvious. The thief, however, is the main thing that's new and different. This game has no thief; the thiefiest functions, like this game's Steal command, were given to Edge the ninja, and Edge is definitely spec'd out as a ninja with good attack power, dual-wielding enabled, a Throw command and some useful ninja techniques as spells. Edge is no thief!Based on values across all of this game's characters/classes, I gave the thief average attack power, intelligence and survivability, below-average spirit, and game-highest speed. I also added a small number of thief weapons (knives and boomerangs) with stats directly from actual FF4 successors (Final Fantasy IV Advance and Final Fantasy IV The After Years) to ensure their balance wasn't completely out of left field. This was done because there are only 3 knives and 2 boomerangs in the entire game, every single one of which would be way too strong for the early game and way too weak for the late game.
Despite the thief's newness, it's not the only thing that makes this novel. This game has a 5-person party allowance that is used through the majority of gameplay, for one thing, and we'll have just four party members. As well, we are completely ignoring several features we'd normally have access to because of the classes/characters we don't have, the most noteworthy of which is probably summoning magic.
I opted to build this on top of the well known Namingway Editon hack, which is itself a fork of the maybe even more well known Project II hack. This restores FF4's features from its Japanese release, adds a small number of unintrusive quality-of-life features, and modifies the translation slightly to conform better to other, more modern entries in the Final Fantasy series.
This is a personal hack, and I didn't want to spoil it for myself as odd as that sounds, so it's barely playtested. I guess this is the playtest, although it's not really intended for widespread release.
Due to the introduction, prologue, and um... other factors... the real gameplay where we can view the actual party doesn't begin until roughly the 10-minute mark of the video. Instantly apparent is the strange balance of vanilla Final Fantasy IV, where Cecil and Kain start out as rather strong level 10 characters, whereas I'm starting with level 1 characters. The only real level 1 character a normal player would ever normally see (Paladin Cecil doesn't count!) is little Rydia, and she's rather delicate at level 1. Well, we're all that way!
Even the normal battles with FloatEyes and Helldivers are somewhat tough at the very beginning. That said, we level up pretty quickly.
I fought random enemies outside of Baron before entering the Mist Cavern at level 5, and we fought the Mist Dragon at level 6. The battle with the Mist Dragon, which you normally do with Cecil and Kain reasonably quickly at level 10, took my team roughly 6 minutes. This was entirely because of our terrible capacity to deal damage: we have lower attack, lower multipliers, no darkness element weapon, and magic is extremely ineffective against it. Its offense wasn't too scary at all; I triggered its counter once and I was worried about it, but it ended up being no big deal. Porom's Pray ability was entirely able to provide all of the healing we needed. Thief was dealing ~18 damage per turn and Cecil was doing 40-50. Pretty lame compared to vanilla!
We went to Kaipo, where we were able to get Thief a minor weapon upgrade (from Knife to Dagger) and progress the event triggers.
I also was able to observe that character swapping with the L and R buttons doesn't seem to work very well with these uninitialized characters.
The Waterway felt slower than usual without our rather strong Cecil. Palom was able to end most battles with a well-placed Thunder or Blizzard spell, depending on the enemies. We were also able to get the usual treasure, like the Ice Rod. The second dark knight sword for Cecil was replaced with a Long Sword so that was a bit of an upgrade for him, but none of the dark knight-specific armor was usable by this team.
The Octomamm battle seemed a bit more manageable than the Mist Dragon, oddly. Cecil and Thief were a bit more consistent with damage, and Palom even more so especially after Boasting a couple of times. It would seem - and this is reinforced by a comment I got from roymerkel8008 on YouTube - Octomamm's script is based around doing a specific number of hits, represented by the number of tentacles. Given you'd normally have Cecil, Tellah and Rydia with their specific abilities most people probably experience this battle close to the same way, but it's a bit different for my unusual group.
When we got to Damcyan, we raided the treasure and the cutscenes played out maybe somewhat differently but without error. My favourite part was when Edward left as a normal person and then walked back in to say goodbye to Anna as a mini-person for some reason.
We did the Antlion's Cave before wrapping up. It started slow, but as my characters crept over level 11 things started to change kind of quickly. The "curve" of stats based on my analysis is largely based around increments of 10 levels, so there's a bit of a power jump there. It should be noted that this curve exists in the base game too, where levels between 1-10 are a small difference, 10-20 is pretty big, 20-50 are huge, 50-60 are pretty big, and 60-70 are small again. There's a big "bulge" in the middle, and with that we see these increases starting to matter more right at level 11. Each level was bringing bigger benefits, most obviously with HP.
Palom also learned Blizzara, which we really put to work against the Antlion. I wanted to use spells to avoid Antlion's strong counters. Palom used Boast three times and then used Blizzara for 1302 damage, ending the fight rather quickly.
We walked out, and returned to Kaipo. Now, unfortunately, I didn't save outside Kaipo and the battle where Edward would normally fight the Seahag/Sahagin crashed the game. I decided this was an okay time to stop!
I guess next time I play, I will be re-doing the Antlion's Den, since unfortunately I saved before that. Naturally we'll dance around that bug somehow.
Index | Next >
