Character Notes

Here are some of my notes and thoughts about the "new" cast.  For those of you who have opinions about how you would like to see characters implemented, I welcome all opinions.

Terra
    Uses Morph.
    from the original game.
    I intend to make little change to this character, but the change to damage formula might not make this possible.
    Do I want Terra to use Fight when tanking, and Magic when DPSing?
Arvis
    Uses Control.
    He salvaged Terra's Slave Crown from the mines, and uses it to take control of enemies.
    I'll have to make sure bosses have minions that he can mind control.
    If his Control targets are always better than his normal Fight damage, then there's no point.
    If he's always superior, then just fight.
    Promising ability, potential for catastrophe.
Leo
    Uses Shock.
    I'm not sure how to treat Shock, since it might get really boring.
    All other special abilities either open a menu (think SwdTech, Blitz, Tools, where there are 8 attacks to choose from).
    But, Shock does only one thing: damage.
    Should I just rewrite SwdTech to be a Shock that increases in damage while it's charged?
    This could eliminate the feeling of "waiting" for that one SwdTech, since they all just kill enemies.
Shadow
    For now, I'm going to give him GP Rain.
    I could keep him with Throw, but I don't really want to; I want to make a Relic that replaces Item with Throw.
    This suffers from the same problem as Leo's Shock: he's a one-trick pony.
    If the damage output from GP Rain > Fight damage, then GP Rain else Fight.  It makes him too mechanical.
    Should GP Rain charge up like SwdTech? Like spending 1-8 gold per level for (whatever) damage?
    Only one of these could possibly be a charging-type ability that replaces SwdTech.
    Which one?  And what to do with the other?
Ensign
    Temporary name.  What do I actually name him?
    Uses Jump.
    The Jump ability gives the tradeoff I'm looking for.
    If he's tanking, then he's using Fight.
    If he's DPSing, then he's using Jump.
    Should I prohibit a Shield with a Spear equipped, just to reinforce the decision?
Vargas
    Uses Blitz.
    Just needs different Blitzes.
    For story reasons, the first one should inflict Condemned.
    For story reasons, the last one should be vanilla Pummel.
    What about the other 6?
    Do I want Vargas' Blitz set to just inflict statuses so he should attack when he wants to do damage?
Shiva
    Uses Summon.
    This has potential to be overpowered, but also to be underpowered late game
    when summons are inferior to normal magic.
    The ability changes based on equipment, and does give Shiva the opportunity
    to be a weird tank character if she has Golem.
    Otherwise, she's meant to be a good healer/DPS.
    She presents good opportunities.  I should change the Espers as little as possible.
Gungho
    Uses Lore.
    Some new Lores are in order, but GrandTrain should still be there.
    It doesn't make much story sense for Dark Force to have all of Strago's Lores.
    I want Hidon to have all of Gungho's Lores.  Though, that falls under Hidon AI changes, not Gungho.
    Change some, but not all of the Lores?
    Which Lores need to be replaced?
Vicks
    Uses Runic.
    Storywise, he's like a non-magic infused, and lower-ranked Celes.  He's also afraid of Terra.
    Runic gives him the ability to be a magic tank.
    Primarily a Tank character, possibly with DPS when not Runic'ing.
    Do I make his Tanking weapons non-runic so reinforce the choice?
    Just needs good equipment options and average stats.
Maria
    Uses Dance. Rename to Sing?
    I should probably make the different dances fulfill different roles. Like, Wind Song for healing.
    Which songs to do what?
    Can I attach a slightly more intelligent AI to the dance?  Should I?
Guard
    Temporary name.  What do I actually name him?
    Uses Tools, Rename to Magitek?
    There are 8 Tools available, and few of them could make the transition.
    This will require some work.
    Air Anchor, Debilitator, are unique enough to be unchanged.
    What of the other 6?  What new Magitek?
Gau
    Uses Rage.
    From the original game.
    I intend to make little change to this character.
    But, I do want to let him use Claw-type weapons like Vargas.
Gogo
    Who do I replace Gogo with?
    I don't know.  Anything that's not Gogo?
Umaro
    Still not controllable.
    I intend to make little change to this character.
    Let's make him equippable.
    Let's make him available in the WoB.

Remember, it's still a work in progress.  So, all of this may change.

I meant to respond to this earlier, but I didn't have the time to write out the post.

You mentioned changes to the damage formulae, but I have no clue what the changes entail, so I'm not going to factor those in yet.

Since you brought it up several times in your character analyses, I want to comment my thoughts about the front row tanking system. While I think it's cool from a technical standpoint, I don't think it works too well from a gameplay standpoint without some tweaking. The core issue is that a character who effectively takes twice as much damage as everybody else is the *last* person who I want taking hits for the rest of the party. Sure, I can have that character Defend, but then I'm effectively giving up that character's turn to have them tank for everybody and take exactly the same damage that I would have taken anyways. And it's usually better to spread out the damage between everybody rather than concentrate it on one character, because if it all hits one character it's more likely that they will die.

So if I put anybody in the front without a clear goal, I'm either just wasting their turn and making it slightly more likely that they will die, or I'm effectively doubling the enemy damage output overall and making it very likely that character will die. So understandably, the largest effect that this change has had on my gameplay so far is scaring me away from putting *anybody* in the front, even characters who I might otherwise place there.

The thing is, FF6 currently isn't designed in a way that makes it easy to make a character that is significantly more effective at tanking than the others, and have that delicate balance scale properly for the entire game. For example (I'm not factoring in Evade right now for simplicity), say I want Vicks to take less damage than Arvis while taking hits for him. Ie, I want him to be a tank that is actually effective. If Arvis has 110 Defense (think early game), then Vicks needs to have ~183 Defense before this starts to become effective. But late-game, if Arvis has 210 Defense, then Vicks needs ~233 for the same results, relatively speaking. It feels like this would be very difficult to manage, since early game Vicks needs ~73 Defense more, but late game Vicks needs ~23 Defense more. You could pigeonhole the characters into specific armor classes and remove all Defense bonuses from Relics, but this wouldn't give the player much flexibility in their equipment decisions. Since HP bonuses from Espers are garbage, it's unrealistic to expect a reasonable HP difference between the two either, so that's out, unless you change those quite significantly.

I can think of a bunch of situational edge cases where the current system is useful, but the only major way that I've been able to leverage it so far is by using the Black Belt. A character Defending in the front is being hit by all enemies in the encounter, so they have a chance to counterattack every attack. This is significantly more effective than just having them use Fight from the back.

It may take some creative thinking to make this system more workable. Perhaps you might want to reverse it so that characters in the back row do the defending. It would make less sense thematically, but it could definitely be the core gameplay mechanic that it feels like you are aiming for here (a lot moreso than the current system, anyways). And it would encourage me to use the front row instead of discouraging me, which is a good thing. You don't have to worry about it being too broken, because you can increases the power of the enemies' physical attacks proportionally to match whatever advantage the player gets. It makes things more strategic without making them easier. It means that the tanks will be using special moves while the DPS uses Fight though, which is going against the grain a little.

With that in mind, let's move onto the characters:

Terra: I can't say that I expect to use her for anything but Magic from the back row right now. It's Terra, so there's nothing more to say.

Arvis: The fact that he uses the Slave Crown for Control is clever. It took me a bit to catch on to that. I think it's reasonable to balance Control against Fight. Just make sure that some monsters have interesting special attacks to use, and that some are duds. If nothing else, Control prevents monsters from taking action, so it won't be a complete waste if you Control a worthless monster. No attention was paid to it in vanilla, but I think you should continue with this ability.

Leo: My best thought for Leo is to give him a totally different command, and then switch that command to Shock when he has the Crystal sword equipped. This fits thematically with vanilla, since he has a Crystal sword equipped during his brief appearance. It also gives you a lot of flexibility to do whatever you really want to do. Finally, this gives a purpose to the Crystal sword, a piece of vendor trash which nobody uses otherwise.

Shadow: I feel like he suffers less than Leo from being too mechanical. Remember that the player also has to make a judgement call on whether the Gil used is worth the damage. The means that it should be saved for emergencies and boss fights, mostly. Throw should hopefully take over for him by the time this decision has worn out its welcome. And hopefully long before the party is swimming in so much cash that there's no decision to make. On a side note, are you planning to use a Clyde spritesheet for him, to match his portrait?

Ensign: You're changing that name? I thought it was funny and emphasized how much of a redshirt he was. You could even reveal that his real name was "Jim" or something in the ending cutscene, just for kicks. Given my thoughts on the front row mechanics above, my thoughts on prohibiting a shield are "it really wouldn't matter that much".

Vargas: It's hard to tell whether he could get away with just setting status effects without the game being closer to fruition. As a rule, if battles are longer, status effects become more useful. You could turn his gimmick into multi-target status effects, which could be very interesting if you put effort into balancing the enemies' status resistances. One thing I like about that idea is that it enforces how much weaker Vargas is than Sabin, and explains why his "ultimate attack" is vanilla's weakest, while still leaving him useful from a gameplay standpoint.

Shiva: I'm assuming that you are planning Summon to work like in ROTDS? Hard to comment without knowing for sure.

Gungho: I don't really like the L. X spells, since there's no intuitive way to know what enemies will get hit by what. Step Mine is pretty broken. Exploder and Pep Up are absurdly bad. Discord, Roulette and Condemned are obsoleted by any competent instant death spell. And finally, Revenge probably needs a lower MP cost. It's a hard call with the others until there's more of a game to look at.

Vicks: The primary example of a character who I'd normally put in the front, but I'm not going to here because he'll be dogpiled into oblivion. How he needs to end up depends on what you do with the row system. If it's unchanged, Vicks will be married to that Black Belt forever.

Maria: Yes, making the Dances fulfill different roles is important, and I agree that it should be renamed to Sing. If you make the Songs more consistent in the roles they are supposed to provide, you can probably get away without an intelligent AI. It's definitely *possible* to make a decent AI mechanism, since B_Run did it for CoV, but it took him some time and I doubt he'll give you something that big out of his hack (as nice as B_Run is ).

Guard: Not sure how to rename him, as I'm pretty bad with names. I'll give feedback on Tools that you think of, but I'm not going to come up with any from scratch.

You're not going to change Gau/Umaro? They were some of the less interesting characters in the original cast, so I feel like they are ripe for replacing. I'm not really sure who to replace Gogo with either.

I think the Ensign's and the Guard's names should be something like Victor and Drake, as a reference to two of the unused Actors in the game's code.

I think I have an idea for Shock, you could use this patch that replaces the Possess command with an 8 spell list, basically works identically to the base game Magitek command. https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showth...p?tid=3024

You could give Leo this command, call it like, Seiken or something as a reference to Beatrix from FF IX who also used Shock. Only problem is that it doesn't add a new learning thing, just set what spells are in this new list, give this command to an Actor and call it a day.

Lots of great feedback.

I've been thinking hard about your comments.  Most are going to be implemented.

But, most importantly, among all of your ideas, you've convinced me to now focus on the mechanics.

Before continuing with the story event hacking, I'll completely implement all the gameplay changes.

Only problem is that it doesn't add a new learning thing...

Interesting idea.  For the moment, let's assume I have the skill to do such a thing. How would you have a character learn?

That's the problem I'm talking about with this specific patch, it doesn't add any new learning set, like with Swd Tech and Blitz, the character with this command would just have all of them from the very beginning.

Yo yo yo. Back when you asked about having a project subforum, I was one of the Mods who playtested what you had. I recorded myself trying it out, giving my live feedback. I completely forgot about it until just now. I'll get to work on editing it right away, and I'll link it in here when it's done. Maybe some input from someone playing it blind could give some interesting insight?

One of the things you seemed confused about is balancing Arvis' Control ability. I thought that was a brilliant idea including that, and maybe you could put it to great use by having recovery abilities in it. Recovery abilities seem to be really rare in your game, so with that in mind you can control a small pool of abilities being used in a battle. Want to provide a way to heal the party? Put Cure on a monster Arvis can control. Need to cast Haste? Maybe a monster has it. I don't think Arvis needs to have good Fight stats, since he's more of a mage character. It's okay to make him useless in a fight that has no monster he can Control, that's the luck of the draw. For having such a useful skill, the drawback is he's useless when he can't do it.

Did you ever decide what you wanted to do with Leo's command?