Magic for temporary party members

Has anyone developed a way to give a limited set of magic spells to temporary party members?

Alternately, is it possible to make a temporary party member able to use the spells known by permanent active party members, as with Gogo?

My thought was: it would be cool if you could have Kefka as a temporary party member while Terra is opening the Sealed Gate. (Obviously this would be an alliance of sheer convenience ha ha). I'd want his commands to be Fight, Magic, and Item. (Not sure what his "special" would be.)

I've been out of the scene for a few years so I've probably missed many developments. Just tipping a toe back in and thinking about concepts.

Thanks!

Gogo style magic is easier to do than a custom magic list.

You can skip this menu part if you don't intend it to last more than one battle...

Code:

C3/0D3C:    BD0000      LDA $0000,X    ; Actor
C3/0D3F:    C90C        CMP #$0C       ; Gogo?
C3/0D41:    F020        BEQ $0D63      ; Allow if so  %%%%Change to EA EA to NOP this branch
C3/0D43:    B01C        BCS $0D61      ; Deny Umaro/guest

The big one is making sure that Umaro and guests use Gogo-style party magic.

Code:

(Pointer table)

C2/575D: 16 57   (Gogo)
C2/575F: 0E 57   (Umaro or temporary character)
C2/5761: 04 57   (normal character, ID 00h - 0Bh)

You can change the middle pointer to match Gogo's, or you can change where the branch distinguishes the two.  Either way will give Umaro and Guests party-based magic (which has no effect Umaro unless you give him the magic command, so this is the easiest approach).


You might also be able to do an 'if guest, load from a ROM learned spell table instead of from a character RAM offset'.  That would require a 0x36 entry table with 0xFF in each spell position the character is meant to know.  I haven't tried something like that, though, so that's all hypothetical.

The one patch MMMMMMagic might also let you give guest characters spell sets.  I'm not as familiar with that one.

Absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much for this great explanation!

For a special ability, could just give him something like Drain or Osmose. Seems it would fit his character. Blink could also be an idea, since he can make body doubles. Only other idea I have would be just something like Bio Blast. Or maybe Control.

Good thoughts, thank you!