Character Notes

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.