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Theorycrafting - Turn FF6 into FF4?

#1
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I'm not sure if this has been done before so maybe I'm just retreading old ground, but - would it be possible to remake FF4 in FF6?

FF6 has two world maps that could be the main world and the underground, and maybe the Serpent Trench map could be turned into the moon? It has enough character slots (FF4 has twelve characters including the two versions of Cecil, plus Golbez at the end of the game as a guest). The mechanic of bosses taking on alternate forms (the Four Fiends, for instance) could possibly be achieved with clever sprite design - like, maybe make Cagnazzo's water aura he summons a separate enemy, and when he "summons the water", make that enemy appear, designed to appear over him, and make it untargetable and invisible so it is just a visual effect, and then remove the enemy from battle when the aura is dispersed. Dunno if that would work but it might?

Battle mechanics, major hurdle would be Mini, Pig, and Toad - we have the Imp spell, maybe we could duplicate its effects three times? We'd have Umaro and Gogo's sprite sheets to spare, after all. Maybe Condemn's mechanics could be duplicated for Gradual Petrify? We'd also need to implement Curse and Paralyze statuses, but I don't imagine that would be difficult. 

For character abilities, the only hurdle would be giving everyone a level up list of Magic they could learn, but if that could be achieved the rest wouldn't be hard, we can just fold Magic into one command list (there are 24 spells each Black Magic and White Magic, FF6 has plenty of room). Lore could be turned into Summon for Rydia, Kain would of course have Jump, Edge can have Steal and Throw (he'd lose Ninjutsu, but FF6's Scrolls are more or less the same thing and cover 4/6 of Edge's Ninjutsu, leaving out Smoke and Shadowbind; if Inviz Edge could be turned into a Shadowbind effect and Smoke Bomb turned into a Throw item, we'd set). Fusoya can have Pray. 

Shock could be retooled as Cecil's Dark Wave, and if we could duplicate Shock's coding into other ability slots, that could be used to create Yang's Kick,  Cid's Scan, and Porom's Cry. Or, if we want to be more creative, we could give Yang and Cid Blitz and Tools wholesale and come up with something new for Porom. Edward could just drop Hide and we turn Magitek into a Bardsong menu. Salve, I dunno if that could be duplicated, but we could get creative again and give Edward Gil Toss. Runic could probably be turned into Cover and we could give Cecil permanent Cover status ala Interceptor. Tellah's Recall could be adapted into Slots with the graphics changed to various spell effects, or given that we have both Rage and Dance to work off of, maybe we could actually create Recall as a command that uses a random ability from a predetermined pool. The abilities I'm not sure if they could be adapted are Rosa's Aim (leave Pray to Fusoya and drop it from her), Yang's Focus (we could just drop Brace), Palom's Bluff, and Twincast. But overall that's most of them that would be feasible.

Of course, the final major hurdle would be changing the battle system to accomodate a party of five characters, and THAT would probably be a lot of work, if it's even possible.

I'm not actually doing this, like the thread title says just theorycrafting if it could be done.
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#2
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For many of these abilities, you can use the Shock/Health shortcut, adding these to a spell in the game, then having the ability simply play the spell. That gets you analyze, pray, cry, kick, scan, and dark wave. All of the rest are doable with ASM. For example, for Recall, you have the system choose a random number between 1 and 128. If the number is below 53 (ie - its a magic spell), then use it as the index number of the spell and cast it with default targeting. That gives it slightly less than a 50% chance of working, and allows Tellah to cast any spell in the game. That could include W Wind or Merton.

The only one that I think would give you trouble is Twincast. There's nothing like that in FFVI.

All in all though, the big question I'd ask of this is "why"? There's nothing you'd gain from this that you couldn't get by hacking FFIV.


Projects:
FFVI: Divergent Paths (Completed) - a complete storyline and gameplay hack of FF6 that adds Leo as a playable character
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#3
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(02-09-2021, 11:32 AM)PowerPanda Wrote: All in all though, the big question I'd ask of this is "why"? There's nothing you'd gain from this that you couldn't get by hacking FFIV.

Admittedly - I know. The major thought that spurred this was that it seems FF4 hacking is not as in-depth as FF6. At the least I haven't seen any FF4 editing tools that offer a full breadth of data viewing and editing similar to FF6usME. But of course, the amount of work that would need to go into such a project would be better spent just learning how to hack FF4 better. And replaying it on its own just as a player would probably not be a big deal.
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I'm actually working on something like this. I'm not very far along, though, since it is an involved process that involves every aspect of the ROM (dialogue, events, enemies, graphics, and maps).

The goal of recreating FF4 in FF6 is to adopt the FF6 aesthetic for the Lunarian Struggle story. The games are quite different, though, so it requires a lot of leniency on not only game mechanics but the plot itself. For instance, while the Serpent's Trench is a third world map, it does not have any collision data... it exists solely for cinematic purposes. To give it that information would mean re-working how the map functions, thus requiring a custom editor to handle it and thereby defeating the point of having an editor already available.

As for FF6 character commands, some of them can be creatively repurposed to become FF4 commands. For instance, making Rage into Recall lets you choose the spell Tellah will cast. 25% of the time it'll go off for free. 75% of the time, he'll act like he's berserk. Assassin's alphabetical rage patch can be used to truncate the rage list to say 24 entries, and since FF4 has significantly fewer enemies than FF6, the extras can be 'recall' dummies. You plop them invisibly into a battle and presto-at the end of the battle Tellah miraculously remembers one of his old spells. SwdTech can be used to charge more powerful kicks or dark waves. That's just the tip of the iceberg; there's lots that can be done without changing the battle engine too much.

But it's an endurance test. Even changing the maps can take an enormous amount of time (I know, I've been working on cities), and you have to be willing to deviate from the source material.
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Adding a 5th battle party member would be a real ASM nightmare. You'd also need to consider adding him as a regular party member, another nightmare lol. If you stick to 4 party member, twincast would be one of the hardest battle hack to implement. "FF4 with FF6" is definitely doable if your goal is to make things more or less close, how close to FF4 it will be depends on the amount of hours you're willing to put into it.

As for hacking FF4, you might want to look at what FF6Tools allow to edit.
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(02-09-2021, 12:11 PM)madsiur Wrote: As for hacking FF4, you might want to look at what FF6Tools allow to edit.

I feel dumb, because I was about to type "I have, it doesn't let you edit a lot of things". Then it suddenly occurred to me I'd been using a GBA FF4 rom, what about SNES?

...oooooooooh!

Maybe this should just be deleted then :p
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