37+ New weapons - FF6 Comprehensive Arsenal Patch

This patch replaces 40-ish animations (almost all of the weapon animations) with new ones designed by me, with a whole new spritework, including guns, bows and more! I think the vanilla game is a bit samey with its weapon choices, specially comparing with Final Fantasy V, that due to the Job system had a lot of diversity in its arsenal.

Sprites were drawn with the objective of being as versatile as possible, able to work with most palettes (some of which were edited too), allowing many possibilities:


You can find a spreadsheet with the replacements and some useful info about them here or in the .zip attachment. Special thanks to DrakeyC, for creating the vanilla weapon animation spreadsheet, that was very useful in this project.

In the .zip attachment, you'll find two .ips patches, the Hack-Oriented and the Plug-and-Play.

Hack-Oriented:
- Changes exclusively animation data: weapon sprites, palettes and animation scripts. Weapon name, stats, and indexing of animations remains unaltered, meaning that weapons may have animations that don't make sense, like a Mithril Claw having a Rod animation. That happens because, in the vanilla game, the animation for the claw is $32, which was replaced by the spiked rod, for example. Being compatible with FFUSME, this patch is intended for hackers who wish to create their own custom weapons or don't want the patch to overwrite weapons they may have already created.

- Apply to a FFIII Us 1.0 rom, headerless.

Plug-and-Play:
- Same as above, but with changes made to weapon data too, mainly the in the table at $ECE400, but also some weapon names, descriptions and stats. This one is intended for anyone who casually wants to shoot Kefka in the face with a shotgun, but doesn't want to bother adding the weapons by themselves. Changes made are the following:

- All weapons have an animation matching its name/type; some weapons were renamed to match their new visuals, like the "Nunchaku", and etc. Most names remain vanilla.

- Replaced Darts, Chakrams, Hawkeyes and some other stuff with 3 bows, 3 firearms and 5 maces (axe, hammer, battle mace and flails), and changed some of their stats: firearms and bows deal the same damage from back row, but maces, flails and etc don't. They are all categorized under the SPECIAL type.

- Characters who can equip firearms: Locke and Setzer (because Darts were replaced, he really needs a new type of weapon to use).

- Characters who can equip bows: Celes (I think, of all the characters, it suits her pretty well).

- All replacements here are insignificant in terms of balancing. This is not meant to be a gameplay/systems focused patch, just cosmetic.

- Apply to a FFIII Us 1.0 rom, headerless.

Some screenshots:





There's still many things that could be done. Whips, Harps, Bells, Crossbows, Glaives... But I'm kinda done drawing sprites for now. However, this likely won't be the last version of this patch (fortunately, there's still some pretty decent space in the ROM for more content), so, feel free to give your suggestions and say what other ways of hurting innocent monsters you'd like to see in the future. And of course, let me know of any bugs or weird things, because I've been working on this for months already and it is very likely that I may have let something slip unnoticed .

These look incredible! I especially like the hammer. Can't wait to try them out.

If you're looking for more weapon ideas, here are a few you could explore down the line:

(1) Morning Star [Flail spike at the end of a fixed handle]
(2) Pickaxe
(3) Shovel [Yeah, it's a Narshe Miner theme]
(4) Wooden Club [Big Sword style]
(5) Crossbow [not Auto variety]

This is pretty cool!

I have to say, I'm impressed. These are really cool. I know how annoying it can be to implement custom weapon graphics.

Very impressive work, the new sprites look great!

This is pretty sweet! I just might have to make an optional alternate weapons patch for my hack with this...

Edit: I have to say, the Shotgun is very creative indeed...

I really like that the staves swing instead of flickering, it makes them much more interesting as weapons to fight with (I hated that in the original FF6) [it's also way more efficient use of the tile space].
Your choice to use the two stray pixels that make the bottom edge of the staff as the firing sight for the shotgun is both brilliant and infuriating, though, since it makes quick and dirty graphic swaps like staff to monkey wrench more difficult. Your optimization is staggering!

I'm looking for a weapon to replace with a cannon, though... maybe one of those oversized swords will oblige such a swap.

Overall, very impressed with this project and I haven't seen any real problems in my own tests of it. Awesome job.

I really like that the staves swing instead of flickering, it makes them much more interesting as weapons to fight with (I hated that in the original FF6) [it's also way more efficient use of the tile space].
Your choice to use the two stray pixels that make the bottom edge of the staff as the firing sight for the shotgun is both brilliant and infuriating, though, since it makes quick and dirty graphic swaps like staff to monkey wrench more difficult.  Your optimization is staggering!

I'm looking for a weapon to replace with a cannon, though... maybe one of those oversized swords will oblige such a swap.

Overall, very impressed with this project and I haven't seen any real problems in my own tests of it.  Awesome job.

Hah, gotta love those stray pixels.  It literally took me years to realize what this one stray pixel was during Setzer's dart attack in my hack. C-Dude, I'm glad you brought that up since I was considering a graphics swap myself. I would have figured it out, but it would have taken a few hours I'm sure.

I really like that the staves swing instead of flickering, it makes them much more interesting as weapons to fight with (I hated that in the original FF6) [it's also way more efficient use of the tile space].
Your choice to use the two stray pixels that make the bottom edge of the staff as the firing sight for the shotgun is both brilliant and infuriating, though, since it makes quick and dirty graphic swaps like staff to monkey wrench more difficult.  Your optimization is staggering!

I'm looking for a weapon to replace with a cannon, though... maybe one of those oversized swords will oblige such a swap.

Overall, very impressed with this project and I haven't seen any real problems in my own tests of it.  Awesome job.

Yeah, I've optimized tiles as much as I could, and even managed to actually save some tiles in the 3bpp graphics data, which I marked with black squares. There should probably be more than enough for any weapon you want to add.



Also, you may not need to replace any weapon in the patch: you can use weapon animation $25, which's unused.

The spreadsheet has animation script addresses, but regrettably is missing many of the other addresses that are modified by your patch. Something very difficult to work out is how the tile maps are changed in the D2 bank (and which changes correspond to which weapon). Could you go into further detail as to how you set up the tile layout for the weapons? This information would be immensely helpful for people trying to add additional weapons, or those trying to integrate them into an existing project. Even simply listing the D2 addresses that each weapon alters would be of tremendous utility. The animation frame data addresses in D1 would be quite useful as well.

Also, both patches have a bunch of FF3USME shifted data (the World of Ruin shift build into the program by its creator). This is fine for the plug-and-play, but you may want to crop the changes after 2EB21E for the hack-oriented patch.

Code:

2EB21E       8    No     0000164D-00001659        D
2F4A46    52D1    No     0000165A-0000692F     52D6