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The difficulty spike: how would you address this situation?

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Moog
I considered what you both said, and decided to try adding Mog first.  I spent a bunch of time futzing with the event code for the battle and finally got something functional within the existing event space.  Basically, I set two event bits true for the battle (Mog is found, Mog is current member of the party) so that he'd appear in the character selection screen.  I then turned those bits back off in the Esper cutscene that followed.  In doing so, I didn't have to nerf the enemies or buff any of the characters.  It's amazing what another party member does for the fight, even just as an extra body to take hits.  It even makes Edgar more powerful; with an extra body to soak damage his Cover ability is more effective.  The fight went from arduous to taxing but beatable, which is what I was going for.

I had gotten Mog to do a pose after Banon's quote, but for some reason the game would soft-lock if Mog was in a party and there were team members not selected.  When I removed all the 'ready' poses from the start of the fight, this soft-lock vanished, so I'm guessing I hadn't set his actor up correct or a pointer was going to the wrong spot.  I did use some free event space to give him dialogue during the fight, though it's just "Kupo-po!".

Likewise, for the "Terra takes flight" sequence, I deleted maybe four of her 'random flight' animations to make room for Mog removal and cleanup.  It's the same move I applied to the Falcon in the World of Ruin to change Character 09's palette to and from 01 during the tomb flashbacks.  Now Terra circles the globe before settling near Triangle Island (or if you prefer to interpret it differently, she's flying towards Crescent Mountain).  Since her flight starts with a listless soar to the west, the scenario is still valid and the player is free to fill in more flight shenanigans with their imagination (burning the house in Kohlingen, flying past Jidoor, landing in Zozo, etc.  It's not like Vanilla depicted any of that anyway, the sequence was pretty random as it was.)

With regards to Cecil's concerns, Mog isn't a solve-all mega character during the fight.  He's got Bolt magic, which is effective against armored opponents, but neither of the dances he knows by the end of the fight are particularly useful for the Esper defense (although CaveJun has Autocrossbow... if you get lucky enough to have it trigger).  His real advantage is that he's got a morningstar, which is a maneater weapon.  The player doesn't get the opportunity to equip him in advance (didn't have room or insanity to try to arrange THAT!), which is okay because he must have wandered out of the mines at the sound of the ruckus and not had time to prepare.  Additionally, being that his presence is completely optional (you don't have to put him in a party), challenge players are free to exclude him from the team if they so desire.

Anyway, thank you both for the input.  I may have lost a night's sleep over this (and I may have to do another full playthrough once this test run is done to make sure my event meddling didn't break anything), but at least the difficulty spike has been addressed!
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RE: The difficulty spike: how would you address this situation? - by C-Dude - 09-14-2019, 06:06 AM

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