ReCast FF3: War of the Magitek

It's been almost a year, and I've been working on this off-and-off to address some of the problems I had with Version 3.

So, now, here, in December of '22, we have version 3_15.  What's different?  Well, lots of things are different and lots of things are the same.

I've reworked and simplified field palettes to allow for more NPC variety.  As a result, the NPCs in towns will be more colorful and more varied.  I also combined Draco with Zhisu to give the late Doma King more poses, as well as give Cyan a more appropriate call-back to the failure at Doma during the Opera.  Additionally, Ultros is now using Sarge's sprites, which freed up another NPC sprite slot that I used to add a 'teenage boy'.  You'll see them used hither and thither throughout the game, including Relm's friend and Duane.

I've also removed the jump hit animation.  It never worked the way I wanted anyway and it was wildly unpopular.  Enemies now animate by showing weapon swipes like the players do.  Some of the weapons they animate with might seem strange for the monster in question; I wasn't super-careful about adjusting which enemy used which weapon attack.  Many of them will still be attacking with brushes, too, which were used to flag ranged attack animation (albeit incorrectly and with stale RAM) in Version 3.

If you open the Config menu, you'll also notice that Battle and Message speed are gone.  These have been replaced with an Experience and Gil slider which dictates the multiplier of rewards gained at end of battle.  Enemy drop values have been adjusted to account for this: the x4 multipliers are equivalent to Version 3 drop rates and the game defaults to x3 for both, which should help to increase the difficulty rate for players who felt the previous versions were too easy.

Which brings us to combat.  I have to say I'm dissatisfied with the feel of the combat engine in this version.  There were pressing bug fixes which have accelerated the need for this release, but the lower experience gains have thrown into sharper focus just where my combat changes fail.  Commands and Magic are both in need of a dramatic overhaul, and equipment is going to need some serious changes too.  I played through the hack using no equip menuing and relying explicitly on event optimizes and the optimize dialogue of the airship.  I was able to make it through the whole game without ever equipping a single relic, which... honestly, is proof of a very big problem.  As the playthrough went on I came to rely on swiss-knife characters like Cyan, Sabin, and Strago, while tabling more utility characters like Terra, Banon, and Edgar.  Edgar in particular is in need of a serious buff, though the code I have on hand which would help is tightly coupled with a Runic nerf and I didn't have time to restart the playthrough and sort that out.  Additionally, I found that some character commands were useful everywhere while others only helped in random encounters and still others were only worth bothering with during boss fights.  Gau also severely underperformed during the playthrough.  While I would like to address these issues, the bugs and the jump-hit removal are too pressing of issues to await months of tinkering.

Any which way, this version comes with some much-needed quality-of-life adjustments, such as automatically equipping characters that are forced into the party and automatically unequipping everybody after BOTH sets of scenarios (instead of strictly the WoR scenarios).  I may seem overly critical of this version but it IS an improvement over Version 3... so if you're looking to play ReCast soon I recommend using this version.

Saves between Version 3 and Version 3_15 are compatible.  When I get around to doing a combat overhaul for Version 4, they won't be, so we'll call that another pro in the 3_15's list.  Character palettes were changed and will be funkified for a while when you load; you can fix the palettes on all of the characters by touching a field save point (the world map doesn't have this repair code, so those saves will have to wait until you can get into a dungeon).  I know the new portraits are a little funky; I was trying to standardize their palette indices to allow for palette change mechanics in the menu down the line (stuff like petrify and zombie).  I didn't get around to actually CODING those mechanics, though, so... it's more baggage of features that were radically dreamed but not realized.  Oh well!

Hope you enjoy, and have a happy holiday season!
-CDude

EDIT: Download link in the first post of the thread. I'm going to wait to push this to RHDN for now, just in case. I think I got on their nerves with the Wrexsoul fix last year.

EDIT 2: There was a new bug introduced in the South Figaro basement, this time during Locke's Scenario. It wasn't game-breaking but it was annoying; the Wind song got locked in until another song was triggered, which... if you didn't get Clyde, could be the whole basement escape. I've changed the wind hint mechanic to sound effects to fix this, and updated the first post with release candidate two. I've also removed the spoilery screenshots, sorry about that. QnA and Credits are now combined in the Readme too.