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Final Fantasy Tactics v1.3


Antonio Pizza
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I love nerds.

And a well determined, slightly sadistic nerd called Archael7 has created a patch for Final Fantasy Tactics as well as its PSP "War of the Lions" counterpart.

Fair warning: the host site is called "Insane Difficulty" and that is not an exaggeration.

YouTube trailer

>>

faq and detailed overview of changes from original FFT

>> http://www.insanedifficulty.com/index.php/Final%20Fantasy%20Tactics%201.3/faq

FFT 1.3 download

>> http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index.php?/files/file/29-final-fantasy-tactics-13/

"FFT 1.3 Content" download (a slightly less difficult version of the patch recommended by the author and about 527 other people including myself) as a starting point to get you used all of the other changes)

>> http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index.php?/files/file/30-fft-content-13-easy-mode/

FFT WOTL version for PSP

>> http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index.php?/files/file/31-fft-war-of-the-lions-13/

15 years later, the original Final Fantasy Tactics still has juice.

This patch spikes the juice.

Enjoy!

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Why would anyone want to play this game on an extreme difficulty? It was already pretty hard and set up in a way to discourage grinding and getting stronger on a reasonable basis. Do people just psychologically enjoy getting beat down and wasting time or what is it?

I have to wonder that too, because there's a difference between overcoming something that's difficult and just being punished by the difficulty. There's no reward in being beat up because a game is so hard, especially if you don't get better things for doing so.

Although grinding and leveling up was really, really easy in FFT: just hit your own characters and heal them. All you need is one random battle to boost your guys by 3-4 levels and about 800 JP. You just need mind-numbing patience.

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Although grinding and leveling up was really, really easy in FFT: just hit your own characters and heal them. All you need is one random battle to boost your guys by 3-4 levels and about 800 JP. You just need mind-numbing patience.

Actually you don't even need to do that, there's a skill you get as a Squire that ups your attack or something that also boosts XP and JP, somehow, but that also requires mindnumbing patience, which might as well be just as painful as grinding against super hard enemies.

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I don't get the mindset of playing ridiculously hard games in any case, but yeah, my first thought was "FFT wasn't exactly a cakewalk in the first place" too. Though it was possible to outlevel the story content, even if the random battles would be kicking your ass by levelling with you.

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I wonder if all the jp's manipulation glitch has been changed in the psx version. Also has the calculators skill been lessened? This game has a pretty big learning curve. Took me a long time to GET it but it's brilliant stuff. It doesn't take much to break the game though.

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i think some people just like to be punished. i have a friend who always tries to do runs in games where he arbitrarily sets a limitation to himself (no energy tanks in metroid, pistol only in resident evil... etc) to add replay value to a game he enjoyed. I once heard of him trying to play through fire emblem on the hardest mode. I imagine thats similar to this. i love FFT but i couldnt play it on hard. i havent even beaten it on normal.

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For those of you who don't get it, I will tell you. People like playing ridiculously hard games because 1) it makes battles way more epic and thusly more fun for challenge seekers and 2) the accomplishment of winning such battles feels good. Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!

I agree that it wasn't really that easy. I don't know how you guys beat it without grinding. I always ground. The problem was not the experience for me as much as it was job points. I should try a no random battles FF Tactics challenge. That could be fun.

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For those of you who don't get it, I will tell you. People like playing ridiculously hard games because 1) it makes battles way more epic and thusly more fun for challenge seekers and 2) the accomplishment of winning such battles feels good. Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!

I agree that it wasn't really that easy. I don't know how you guys beat it without grinding. I always ground. The problem was not the experience for me as much as it was job points. I should try a no random battles FF Tactics challenge. That could be fun.

But that's why we have games like Bard's Tale and the Etrian Odyssey, games that are real ball-busters yet provide enough reward for people to want to play them. It's different when people hack a game that was balanced with its own tested difficulty curve, and make it into some teeth-gnashing monster.

Roguelikes are hard and you expect to die in them. You don't expect Final Fantasy to be a challange, and the rewards of making a game you've played many times before challenging are meh. It turns into a pissing contest, about who could beat what game with one solo party member or whatever. I played a no-spell, no-equipment Castlevania SotN game once, and really got no enjoyment out of it (I couldn't beat Galamoth anyway). There's no reward since it's a game I'm familiar with anyway.

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I really appreciate the idea of games that we grow up loving having different game mechanics beyond those we've generally encountered. It does add something to the replay value imo. And in terms of FFT, which takes a long time both to learn and master, I really GET IT... But I am a bit of a gaming masochist. But I am not really too keen on facing lvl 3 characters that have dual chaos blade + Excalibur, Secret clothes, 97 BRAVE BLADE GRASP. WTF lol

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Because after playing the game for 15 years and mastering every character in every skill (yes, even summoners), the game left only a couple of challenges outside of the Deep Dungeon. And despite it probably being my 2nd favorite game the only thing left to try in it are self imposed challenges like sending 2 or 3 characters in Bariaus Hill or Finath River alone (I was on the tail end of Chapter 4 in a newly started game to test that theory...again, when I heard about v1.3). I've beaten the game 2 or 3 times, but I usually never bother to. I just run around the land going to Finath, Bariaus, and DD.

So for me the overall enjoyment of FFT never left but the challenge of it lost teeth. This patch is the denture set... a vampire fang-sized denture set.

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I must admit, the idea of ramping up the difficulty a few notches on this does not appeal.. I'm pretty much stuck on 5 different releases at the same point in the game, and yes, grinding isn't worth the effort, especially when all your gear gets destroyed and you can't replace it =/

But hey, that's just me.

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Because after playing the game for 15 years and mastering every character in every skill (yes, even summoners), the game left only a couple of challenges outside of the Deep Dungeon. And despite it probably being my 2nd favorite game the only thing left to try in it are self imposed challenges like sending 2 or 3 characters in Bariaus Hill or Finath River alone (I was on the tail end of Chapter 4 in a newly started game to test that theory...again, when I heard about v1.3). I've beaten the game 2 or 3 times, but I usually never bother to. I just run around the land going to Finath, Bariaus, and DD.

So for me the overall enjoyment of FFT never left but the challenge of it lost teeth. This patch is the denture set... a vampire fang-sized denture set.

Basically this. It's a way to continue enjoying the core concept of something that you really love while still experiencing the thrill of the original challenge.

FFT was not an easy game to understand at first for anyone who played it, unless people came into it knowing it came from the same folks who made Tactics Ogre. There are people who became so familiar with the game that further replays to try and experience all the permutations of the near-infinitely deep battle system got bored, due to their knowledge as well as some game breaking bugs.

While I'm not one who enjoys this kind of punishment, it's not surprising that it exists. I'm more a fan of Final Fantasy Tactics Complete, and the WOTL script patch for the PS1 version. Combining those two patches together fixes a lot of what was wrong, both gameplay wise and script wise, with the PS1 version. Anyone who wants to get a fresh exposure to FFT without having their testicles demolished should look those two up instead.

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With all this in mind, what do people make of the iOS port? Is that all it really is, a port (with added cloud save capability as of late?)

Yes... it is one of the many copies I've got a hold of. Despite never getting far in the game I really enjoyed it for the fact it mixes up the FF series very well by making it very much tactical instead of "I r find evryting, I r poke Sephy... he ded. Gaem over."

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I'm not sure I want to play an extreme challenge FF Tactics but a harder one would be nice. Most RPG's give you a cool system, but if you actually bother to learn it, the game becomes too easy. The main story path also becomes too easy if you walk off of it to do available sidequests. Tactics doesn't have a lot of actual sidequests, but if you try to explore all the jobs as you play, your main character level will end up being higher than what the story path enemies can field.

I would prefer a Final Fantasy Tactics that expects you to learn the system and exploit it if you want to win. SMT: Devil Survivor is a great example of a turn based strategy game that does this. Simply grinding won't let you win. You have to figure out the system to progress. It's not a cheap hard difficulty, what makes the game hard is that the AI exploits the game's system almost as much as an actual human player would.

It's a difficult game, but the rush I got when I finally beat the final boss was like nothing else. I could really feel all the hardships my characters had been through to achieve their victory.

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Basically this. It's a way to continue enjoying the core concept of something that you really love while still experiencing the thrill of the original challenge.

It's not the original challenge, it's a highly upshifted challenge. I don't know how increasing the level of punishment you take from the game resembles anything of a core concept when so much of the original programming and arrangement is built around what the difficulty setting used to be.

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godam you guys are a bunch of curmudgeons

how dare someone try to rebalance a game for a challenge

That's the problem though, the game was balanced and was a challange in spots. Did you know that the Deep Dungeon fights were random battles on the map in chapter 4? I ran into the 12 monk fight at Barius Hill and was wiped out, and this was my uber half-females-wearing-chantage team.

Anyway a lot of these hacks people do to increase difficulty seriously imbalance them, and force difficulty by doing something cheap like rendering healing items useless. I can understand upping the stats of all monsters, or making healing items a rarity, but some of the hacks I've seen have been "we're going to make this cruel". I mean if you think it's fun, fine. Somebody must, if people are making these hacks. It's not re-balancing the game, though. Besides, not everybody has the time to spend re-attempting the same fight over and over.

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exactly, these things aren't meant for everyone

The same way concrete enemas aren't meant for everyone ;)

If anyone here does play through it and decides to stream or YT it, I'd probably watch it. Eventually. I like watching people put the game pain on themselves. It's about as close to gladiator games gore enjoyment as I can get right.

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That's the problem though, the game was balanced and was a challange in spots. Did you know that the Deep Dungeon fights were random battles on the map in chapter 4? I ran into the 12 monk fight at Barius Hill and was wiped out, and this was my uber half-females-wearing-chantage team.

Aw shit, I saw my oldest brother play that fight twice. Once solo with his super-beefed-out-knight-calculator-100%-evade-from-three-sides character (which he met a horrible demise) and another with that character and a black mage. It was amazing to watch, actually.

In all seriousness, this is the kind of game my brothers and sister would love - they all learned not only how to grind, but all the deep mechanics that were involved (like alignment matching in fights and in team building, the whole reflect shenanigans, actually making use of the mime class, etc.) so they could beat the game as efficiently as possible, as under-level'd as possible. Once you learn all of that, a game like this one really makes one take full advantage of all of those things in order to survive.

I can see people being upset about the difficulty of the whole thing, but from what I read into it there is a certain amount of balance that went into this patch, too - it's hard, but it's not blindly punishingly hard; if you know the mechanics well enough then there's always a decent solution to the difficulty.

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