LFT: An FFT mod (The final release is a lie. Download here!)

[Laggy]

Richard actually basically modified every single rare formation fight in the game. The iconic ones (SMB, 13 singular job, etc.) still exist of course, but every map location has a tailor made encounter if that's your thing.

You can use the Select button on a map node to check from which direction you need to approach the location from to trigger the rare battle formation (it's unchanged from vanilla, but this way you don't have to look it up in an FAQ or whatever.) The encounter rate is still the same, though.

[rangerfantasma]

Thanks for the answer, guys. I will pay more attention to the Innate skills.

Richard actually basically modified every single rare formation fight in the game. The iconic ones (SMB, 13 singular job, etc.) still exist of course, but every map location has a tailor made encounter if that's your thing.

You can use the Select button on a map node to check from which direction you need to approach the location from to trigger the rare battle formation (it's unchanged from vanilla, but this way you don't have to look it up in an FAQ or whatever.) The encounter rate is still the same, though.

I see. How can I notice if it is a rare formation or not, If they have changed?

[Laggy]

No specific pattern that I could point out, but.... it should be quite obvious. Usually a high enemy count and custom set equipment/RSM. The rare fights are considerably higher difficulty than the normal encounters.

There's also generally some good loot to be had, if you're into the stealing business, from most of those fights.

[rangerfantasma]

Thanks, Laggy!

I'm actually reviving the playing for this patch. I used to play a lot back around 2010's. Now that I updated my phone, one of the first things that I though about was playing FFT. As the android release still has the lag problem (and this probably will not be solved), for the moment I chose LFT, that I love.

Also, I was thinking about the level limit of the story battles. Is it difficult to make the story enemies follow the level of the party? I ask if it is difficult because it could be two patches: one without the level changing and the other one following the party level. Of course, this is probably a personal taste, and if it was not done until now, it was not the idea for the project.

[Laggy]

It would not be too difficult, just a lot of manual data entry. Basically you could download FFTPatcher (from FFHacktics), open your patched ISO, and go through all of the story battle entries under the ENDT formations and set all enemies to "Set to party level" (or +1, +2, etc. as you desired.)

A bit of background on this if it interests you. I intentionally didn't scale story battle enemies because this project was originally designed within the confines of this community (a lot of old FFT players from the GameFAQs FFTSB board reside around here) and we wanted to keep the design principles fairly close to vanilla. Also, if you're an experienced FFT player and don't go out of your way to grind, you'll generally find yourself below the level of story fight enemies (I think during playtesting my average level at Altima was around 30, assuming I wasn't doing some weird challenge; 40 is certainly quite standard, while endgame enemies are in their high 50s.) This adds a little bit of extra challenge if you're a veteran.

Conversely, if you're new to the game/getting used to LFT's changes and experimenting, you might end up leveling a lot. We didn't want to punish players for grinding if that's their preferred playstyle, either, since plenty of players would rather reap the benefits of putting in the time to grind/outlevel stuff. This does create a bit of an awkward middle zone where someone who's both grinding/unlocking a lot of stuff and still wants an appropriately scaled challenge might find the encounters easier, but I think it's an acceptable compromise to avoid people getting upset that leveling ends up potentially making fights harder for them. This problem also goes away on replays, where you have a better idea of what you want to get. (A sidenote here, too, if you're looking to get JP to unlock jobs and abilities but don't want to overlevel too much, propositions work quite well for that.)

In general, the design philosophy I had in mind is that if you want to get a harder experience, it's easy to impose those difficulties on yourself, whereas the risk of making things overly hard for players potentially (from level scaling story fights) is not as easy to address.

[rangerfantasma]

Sounds fair enough to me. I'll take a look at the FFTPatcher, and experience it. But something says to me that things can go really bad doing this.

One last question for the time: the rare battles are available only on Chapter 4, or since the beginning of the game?

[DragonKnight Zero]

Rare battles unlock in Chapter 4 except for Finath River, Germinas Peak, Poeskas Lake, and Doldolbar Swamp.  For those locations, it's necessary to clear the battle series at Limberry Castle.  Not certain on Dogoula Pass though the pattern suggests that location's rare battle unlocks after Limberry.  Bed Desert also deviates from the pattern as its rare battle as well as battle 3 and 4 seem to unlock earlier.

[rangerfantasma]

I see. I just started chapter 4 and until now no rare battle. Guess I'll advance some story battles to see If anything chances.

When a party ninja is charmes, he throws items from the party stock or from the AI?

[DragonKnight Zero]

A charmed ally uses your stock regardless of which team inflicted the status.  On a related note, it would suck if you charmed an enemy Samurai or Ninja and it broke/threw your only copy of a rare weapon so it's actually for the better the mechanics work this way.

[renegadeofunk]

Hello. Still having great fun with this mod. I think I may have found a bug though -- Ramza's Cheer Up doesn't seem to go off like 80% of the time. When it does work my unit is always close to Ramza. Is there something like a range limit on it?

[Laggy]

Cheer Up is charged on a panel, unlike Quick. So if the unit moves before it goes off it will whiff.

[renegadeofunk]

Oooh so that's what's happening, thanks. And may I suggest that be added to the docs

[TigerKnee]

Cheer Up is charged on a panel, unlike Quick. So if the unit moves before it goes off it will whiff.

That seems kinda counter-intuitive - is there any particularly glaring issue making it a "follow target" move?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

It's mainly a balancing measure. Cheer Up gives up ease of use compared to spending MP for Quick.

[superaielman]

It was changed because Laggy  hates me personally and loved nerfing things I use to good effect. ;_;

[metroid composite]

If Laggy just nerfed things you liked, super, then Knights would be weaker than they are in vanilla.  (Instead of, y'know, massively buffed).

[Luther Lansfeld]

LFT marathon!

Now that our three person playthrough was successful thanks to Lancer with Item, Mage with Calculator, and Knight with Two Swords, we decided to start another one.

We decided to go with a FE:F theme. Ramza is Ryoma, who is aiming to be a samurai (obviously), and we have two female generics named Hinoka, who is a lancer / archer who rides a black chocobo, and Xandra, who is aiming toward Dancer / Calculator and rides a red chocobo.

Chapter 1 was not too bad at all. We had a reset at the Mandalia Plains thanks to Charm, but that was the only reset that we had all chapter. I used quite a bit of Knight with Black Magic with Xandra, Ryoma was building toward Monk and other pre-reqs for Samurai for much of the chapter, and Hinoka was Archer for most of the chapter, and Thief/Lancer later.

Chapter 2 started out pretty easy; we had Ice Bow and Black Magic for Araguay Woods, which made it a joke, and the falls is always pretty bad even in LFT, but we had our second reset on Zaland Fort City thanks to Zombie. Zombie is actually a pretty effective spell if you make it cheap and large range and fast! Imagine that. That effect really trickles down into making Stigma Magic and other status healing abilities better as well.

In the middle of Chapter 2 Hinoka had her Lancer stuff going, Xandra spent her time working toward Dancer / Calculator depending on fight, and Ryoma was mostly a Monk. (Ryoma and Xandra have best Zodiac, so Ryoma heals her for a fuckton of HP/MP with Chakra, which is nice synergy. I also gave Xandra Defense UP for her troubles while levelling Lancer. It has really paid off to have a mage with Defense UP.

Other fights happened and were fun, but the really interesting one was the Execution Site (of course). Gaffy decided to use Throw on Hinoka on turn 1, but he did it within her spear range, so he got countered and immediately died to Charge +10. Good work Gaffy. Otherwise, we used Secret Fist (!!!!) and Poison to neutralize a couple of the knights. Good times. Definitely a hairy fight at times like it always is, but we won on the first try, which is a miracle to be honest.

Lionel was the third fight that we had a reset on because we accidentally stood in Summon formation and got Cyclops used on the two people who were not Ramza. And we died horribly. Whoops. Second one was a long slugfest involving lots of Chakra, PA Save on Ramza to power up his Punch Art, Secret Fist (mostly against us), and Red Chocobo Priest reviving people on the roof of the watchtower. Glad Ramza equipped Rubber Shoes because he really needed them with the epic tier of turtling that occurred. Good times.

The fight that gave us the most trouble was Goland Coal City. It is a frustrating fight in LFT because so much of it feels like it is under the control of what Olan does and what equipment the enemies have. If the Chemists have enough Jump to get up onto the roof, it feels like a losing fight unless you really have the ability to gun them all down, which we didn’t. Olan’s AI was quite bad in that fight and he kept moving toward the enemies. There was one of the tries that I healed him to full and he still died within the turn. Out of the many enjoyable fights in LFT, this one is a bit of a miss. Eventually after three tries he used Galaxy Stop on turn 1 which turned the tide.

The last fight we did before breaking was Zalmo. Xandra used Wiznibus, while Hinoka rained death from above (and got Throw Stone’d for 100 damage lol), while Ryoma got in the fray with Punch Art.

Still working on opening Calculator!

Overall we played about 10 hours yesterday. It has been a long time since I did that much gaming in one day.

[hitokiro]

Sorry if this isn't the best place to post this question, but I can't find any other threads about support for this mod, and it sounds like several of you are playing through the whole game so I know it's possible.

I patched a vanilla FFT iso with the LFT changes, and can tell that they've been applied because of differences in Ramza's Wish ability, etc. The problem is whenever I try to equip or remove an ability (move exp-up, for example) the game freezes completely. This happens on both my CFW PSP, and RetroArch on windows 10, so I don't think it's necessarily related to my emulation method.

Has anybody else run across this? I can still play through the game a bit but without support/movement/reaction abilities I'm going to have a tough go of it 

[Dark Holy Elf]

If it's happening with two unrelated emulators then I'd guess something is wrong with the ISO, either due to a problem in the original ISO you used or an error that occurred while patching. Maybe try finding another ISO somewhere and making a fresh patch?

[hitokiro]

If it's happening with two unrelated emulators then I'd guess something is wrong with the ISO, either due to a problem in the original ISO you used or an error that occurred while patching. Maybe try finding another ISO somewhere and making a fresh patch?

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. I created a second PSP compatible FFT based on the vanilla ISO I originally patched, and that one doesn't seem to have the glitch in it. I can load my LFT save and make changes (with the original ability tables in place) and then re-load that save in LFT. Pretty weird, so I figured maybe somebody else who'd created an LFT patched game might have seen this as well.

[hitokiro]

Hmm so strange. I procured another base FFT image and patched it with LFT using ppf-o-matic. Ran that updated image through PSX2PSP and copied it over to the CFW PSP. Still freezing when I equip or un-equip secondary, reaction, support, or movement abilities.

As a sanity check, this patch is for FFT and not FFT WotL, correct? I assume so since there's a version with the script changes on the LFT main page. Now that I think of it maybe I should try one of those other patches (WotL script and/or music disabled) just to see if I'm getting this glitch no matter what version I use.

No worries if nobody has seen this before or doesn't have advice. I'm just documenting what's going on in case this comes up again in the future.

[Laggy]

This sounds like an issue I've heard before with PSP emulation, though not the exact symptom you described. It has to do with an ASM edit I incorporated into the mod. I created a version without it so you can try it below:

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Or if you want the Complete (WotL translation):

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT+Complete_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Let me know if that works for you.

[hitokiro]

This sounds like an issue I've heard before with PSP emulation, though not the exact symptom you described. It has to do with an ASM edit I incorporated into the mod. I created a version without it so you can try it below:

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Or if you want the Complete (WotL translation):

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT+Complete_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Let me know if that works for you.

Thanks for the reply and alternative PPFs! (and all the hard work on the mod, of course).

I've narrowed down what might be happening. For both the PSP and RetroArch emulation, I was creating EBOOT files using PSX2PSP, and by default this compresses the bin/cue file by quite a bit. I took the patched bin file and ran it directly using ePSXe and everything looks like it's working fine! Must be something in the way the compression is happening with PSX2PSP that is making the game angry. I'll probably play around with this some more including trying these other PPF files, and post any interesting results.

As of right now the moral of the story is: you can't create an EBOOT of LFT without running into this bug. At least I don't know how to (yet...)

[heretic]

This sounds like an issue I've heard before with PSP emulation, though not the exact symptom you described. It has to do with an ASM edit I incorporated into the mod. I created a version without it so you can try it below:

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Or if you want the Complete (WotL translation):

http://www.rpgdl.com/LFT/LFT+Complete_NoRSMLimit.ppf

Let me know if that works for you.

Just chiming in to say that I was having the same issue -- freezing when setting/removing abilities -- and LFT_NoRSMLimit patch fixed it. I am on PC using Mednafen emulator, basic setup and minimal tinkering with settings or anything. I am not an expert at this stuff and literally set it all up today for the first time just to play LFT. I have used ePSXe in the past and considered setting it up again to see if that resolved the issue, since that seemed to work for above poster and another source I saw. Doesn't seem like the issue is related to EBOOT or PSX2PSP or PSP emulation or any of that but just the emulator used, specifically Mednafen (and Retroarch I think? Which uses the same cores), and is probably fine in ePSXe.

Is it ok to just continue using this "NoRSMLimit" version of the patch? Or was that just a test to diagnose the issue? (which it did lol)
Is using the NoRSMLimit patch going to break or be missing any of the "core" LFT content and experience? And should I go out of my way to set up and use the ePSXe emulator instead with the actual LFT release?

[Laggy]

The only thing the No RSM Limit does is remove an ASM modification that prevented you from slotting RSM abilities that a class already has innately. It's purely a QoL thing. For example, it would prevent you from slotting Defense UP on a Knight, because they already have that. In vanilla it was hardcoded for certain jobs (like Chemists can't slot Throw Item) but since LFT added a lot more innate RSM abilities on classes there's a lot of potential room for redundancy.

Slotting something twice doesn't actually hurt you in any way (or allow any abuse), it just won't do anything. So yeah, you're not depriving yourself of anything by using that. Honestly, the fact that it causes issues with people successfully running the mod means I should probably make it the standard.