Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (Maeson) GBA ROM

This is a hack for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, an Strategy RPG made for the Game Boy, and part of a group of games that are connected by the setting of Ivalice, including not just the original Final Fantasy Tactics, but also games like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII.

The aim is to overhaul the game play of FFTA. The intention is to make most of the content of the game engaging and useful in search for a more varied and smooth experience, in contrast to having a very select few number of elements dominating the game, and making it far less interesting for the author of this hack.

Among the changes made to the game, are these:

· Altering many game play aspects in search for a different type of balancing. This means taking away most of the weight on the formula used for normal attacks (used by the Fight Command and Abilities that use it) and making Abilities themselves be the main focus of the game, doing away with the concept of “one-shooting” everything in your path through the use of the usual suspects like Double Sword, or reducing the power from egregious elements to make a fairer game.

· Doing a major rework for Jobs. Stat growths, ability sets, and each one’s smaller aspects like Evasion and Status Defense to make as many of them interesting not just for their abilities, but to be actively used as the primary Job. Offensive stats and Speed are standardized, and is through equipment and their own quirks that the player can control if they prefer more power than Speed, or better survivability.

Some Jobs, like Morpher and Beastmaster received much bigger changes, and some shared Jobs, like Thief or Time Mage, differ in statistical growths and the Abilities they can use depending on the Tribe. On top of all that, each Job is capable of using four different types of weapons, which also expands the possibilities to set up and customize your units, when combined with a secondary Action Ability set.

· Very extensive changes to Abilities. Pretty much all now cost MP, and have their own Power values instead of using the weapon’s attack power (which is no longer used for any formula) for calculations. Damage, effects, range, number and targets and such was taken into account to attempt to make them fair all around. For example, single target abilities or melee ranged ones cost less MP than area of effect or long ranged ones, less intrusive Status Effects cost Less than those that cause Petrify or Frog, etc. Most damaging abilities now do elemental damage, and instead of the usual way of learning Abilities, now a JP System is used, where the player accumulates JP and can spend it to learn Abilities.

· Equipment has gone through a massive change-up. All gear has been grouped into three tiers tied to story progression (except accessories, which are equally useful throughout the entire game). Weapons also now provide Speed gains, based on the fact that Weapon types now represent, for the most part, some archetypes. For example, Swords and Rapiers are balanced in power and speed, Knives trade power for higher Speed, Knightswords and Instruments offer reduced power but boost your defensiveness, etc.

· All battles have been given a new coat of paint. Changes to their line ups, their equipment, changes to the AI as to what actions to choose (but mind you, it’s still mostly FFTA in that last regard). Enemies are better geared and know more abilities the more you progress through the game, with the vast majority of enemies having two ability sets as the norm, instead of very rarely like in vanilla.

Battles scale to your highest leveled unit, so there’s both no rush to grind, and no way to “overlevel” your enemies. Higher Levels means more MP for abilities and therefore more interesting game play, so it’s not like leveling is discouraged, it’s more about training all your units equally than having a couple of units with ridiculous levels destroying everything.

· Dispatch Quests have been reordered in order to make the game flow better. Now you get Quests that reward items for future dispatches, instead of mostly being the opposite, first getting those with requirements and several story missions later, getting the ones with the items you needed. With this change, not only the quest list won’t be bloated with missions you can’t do, it helps with the flow and pace of the game.

On top of that, to access the second story after reaching post game no longer needs to do the 300 numbered quests, so you can do it much sooner and even jump from optional quests to story quest as the player would do normally.

· Some tweaks to Laws. For example DMG2:Animals does no longer exist, Fight is no longer in the earliest set of rules, several of the punishments, like permanent statistical reductions were removed (but these can be brought back with an optional patch) and rulesets have been modified as the game progress. New Laws for elements that did not exist before were also added.

· Included with the main hack, a number of optional patches have been added. They range from further game play changes, like making Marche and Montblanc have different sets of Jobs or reduce the maximum number of your units on the field to increase challenge, to a patch to skip the introduction when starting a new game, or a small visual tweak.

The Main patch comes in a BPS format, while the optional patches are IPS, and can be freely applied.

Special thanks to FlamingZelda for the help provided, to Dartharon the tools AIO and Text Editor, Hextator for the tool Nigthmare, and the general Final Fantasy Hacktics community for their wealth of information and help.

This hack is based on Leonarth’s Engine Hack project, which can be found here: https://github.com/LeonarthCG/FFTA_Engine_Hacks

1.2.0:

Several updates have been made, based on feedback from comments I received or reviews:

* Descriptions for many abilities have been tweaked where possible, as the way this game works
with text can be very finicky. In any case, now the element for offensive abilities has been
written into the descriptions, and whenever possible, other details such as if it's physical
or magical, long ranged and such.

Other abilities also had their descriptions tweaked to make them easier to read, and others
like Ice Sword or the weapon Pearl Blade got their descriptions corrected. Truth be told,
I wanted to do this before, but I was so burnt out of making this hack that I just needed
time to rest... Which I didn't take because I jumped to another project, because I don't learn.

* I have lowered the MP cost of Fire, Blizzard and Thunder for the Red Mage from 20 to 15.
There might be other changes related to Dualcast in the future but it's a very hard thing
to get right, if you can get it right at all without taking the value from other things.

Soul Blade's Power was raised from 30 to 35. Remember that it can cause Slow too.
Piercethrough's Power was raised from 35 to 40, range from 2 to 3, and MP cost from 15 to 20.
Ifrit, Ramuh, Shiva and Madeen's MP Cost lowered from 35 to 30.

I will possibly make some changes to Blue Magic in the future but that needs a lot of time
to test around and I am busy already.

* I corrected the several cases where a rival clan member would have hidden weapons that were
not possible to equip realistically, like a Black Mage with a Blade. This is because I kept
changing clan setups until the very end and some things slipped. Appropriate gear was put
in place of the wrong items.

* I made some tweaks for the Mission Emerald Keep, to reduce the available "buffing" abilities
from the enemy team, so they decide to attack more regularly, and adding a couple of offensive
abilities too.

* I remade the main patch and a couple of others, in order to remove some unnecessary data
added by tools at the end of the ROM. This also opens the door to also include an IPS file
for the the Main Patch!

* I also added an optional patch that changes the MP Regeneration system from flat 5 MP each
turn, to a 10% of its maximum MP. In addition I added 5 base MP to all units to be 50, so
the recovery is at least 5 MP. I considered it at one point but I thought it would be too
generous. But regardless, it's an option now.

* About Laws, On PokeFaize's review it is mentioned that "Laws are a lil buggy" but the examples
it mentions need more detail. Some Abilities use the Weapon's Range, and if used with a Bow,
they are considered inside the Missile prohibition Law. It's no glitch, and it's how the
original game works too, but because weapon's are so limited to Classes, it's harder to find
examples. But for an example on this hack, a Soldier using PowerBreak with a Gun would activate
it, even if you attack point blank.

About elemental laws, I went and tested them again, and they work as intended. I also checked
all the elemental traits from abilities, and haven't found any. The only reasonable thing I can
imagine is a weapon with an element that I did not wrote down was the culprit with a normal
attack or something, which I have fixed some of them. Beyond that I cannot see anything.

Now, about removing Laws, I personally don't like the idea. The only times when I am negatively
affected by it is when I am in a stupidly not caring on what's going on. On top of that, as I said
on the Readme before this patch note, the Anti-Law system is there, it's helpful, sometimes even
too helpful. It is not a change I want nor I'll make on the main version of this hack.

...Nonetheless, I have added an optional patch that makes each Law Set throughout progression
empty. While there could be other ways to do this, like with Leonarth's Engine hacks, deeper changes
would render Save Files extremely prone to corruption, either if you started with Laws and then decided
to remove them or viceversa, as those deeper changes would involve changes like the removal of Anti Law
cards from the Mission rewards, and it's those modifications that would affect save files.