Tactics Advanced How I would make a new Final Fantasy Tactics

Hobgoblyn

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I have gone back and been playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the last couple weeks. In general I still think it is a good game, but it came out so very long ago and even playing through it I feel there are a lot of things that felt badly implemented or were artificial challenge. In fact, the "best way" to play the game is by not exploring or experimenting or trying to complete everything which seems quite backwards to me.

So here are ideas I had on how to make a new Final Fantasy Tactics game.

Difficulty Modes
On normal mode, the Judge system is effectively nothing more than "Complete this quest with this restriction, you will get bonus gil and items"
On hard mode, if you fail to uphold the rule then you will lose the battle, BUT when you do so you have the option to immediately retry the battle from character selection or to give up on the mission.

On normal mode, the quests do not scale-- the quests are a set level and so if you decide to stay back and complete every low level quest or redo the repeatable ones over and over again, you have the option to make the game easier through grind.
On hard mode, the quests scale to the average level of your party, or better yet, they scale to the average level of the characters you select for the mission with a minimum level being the level on normal mode (the enemy's level won't be generated until party members have been selected)

On normal mode, quest board quests will appear on the quest boards either every month or every year depending on the quest.
On hard mode, quest board quests will not reappear once they have been completed.

Races and Models
Within the game there will be more races than before.
Humes, Bangaa, Moogles, Nu Muo, Seeq, and Vierra would be available right from the beginning of the game, you can recruit them in the very first town and will make up your initial party.

As you progress through the game, other races will be unlocked. The Gria and Rev will become available once you enter into the regions they live in. The Aegyl will become recruitable after doing story missions to help. The Garif generally want to avoid combat, but after story missions involving helping them, braver ones decide to start joining you. The Baknamy will initially appear to be simple monsters, but after many battles against them a way to break at least some them free of the control of the mist can be found and then they become recruitable. There would probably be one more additional race introduced as well in order for there to be a total of 12 races (it goes with the whole Zodiac theme).

Every race should have a boy and a girl model, but perhaps with some races the difference is pretty small and maybe extra missions need to be done to unlock Vierra boys and Garif girl.

Each race should have exactly 11 jobs, but of these 9 of them should appear, or functionally appear (different job name, nearly identical abilities) on multiple races.

If these were sprites, 264 sets of player sprites that need to be animated from all 4 angles would be way too much. However, since the game would be made for modern hardware, it is actually 24 player models and each of those models having 11 different outfits (mostly just skins), and unique characters would either have their own unique model with outfits for each job or they might be a unique skin for their race's model. And even the gender differences probably don't need to be anything more than just alternate skins for most races.


Jobs and Levels
In the first 3 Final Fantasy Tactics games, unfortunately one of the issues is that it encouraged one to look up which jobs had the most powerful abilities, play as jobs only enough to obtain those scant few abilities that you could equip, then park yourself on whichever job had the most powerful stat progression. Instead I want to switch to a system that very much encourages players to frequently switch jobs on their characters and really caps out on how specialized a character can even be.

The jobs would be laid out as such for each race

Fighting 1 -> Fighting 2 -> Fighting 3 ->
Specialist 1 -> Specialist 2 -> Specialist 3 -> Paragon 1 -> Paragon 2
Magic 1 -> Magic 2 -> Magic 3 ->

Of course, for each race just how "fighting" their fighting branch is or how "magic" their magic branch is could be wildly different. So a Nu Muo's fighting branch might seem more like a specialist branch for other races while a Bangaa or Seeq "magic" branch might not get real spells until stage 2 or even 3. The specialist branch is where archers, gunners, thieves and others that aren't really fighters or mages of any sort would go, or would be a second but less specialized fighting or magic branches for specialized races.

Character level separate from jobs would be entirely eliminated. Instead, the character would level by gaining levels in their jobs. Each job would have 9 levels. The character's total level would be determined by their total job level. So if one levels up all 11 jobs to level 9, they will be a level 99 character.

To unlocking the next tier, you need 4 levels in the tier before it. To unlock the first tier of Paragon you need level 4 in either of the tier 3 jobs and to unlock Paragon 2, you need level 4 in all three 3rd tier jobs and Paragon 1. So you need to be minimum level 40 to unlock the Paragon 2. In addition, they may be quests associated with unlocking Paragon 1 and 2 for each of the 12 races.

Every time you level up the job through completing missions, the character gains a new ability and its stats would increase. Each subsequent level in the same job would require more AP to unlock and each level up in the chart a job is, also the more AP it takes to unlock each level. For example a Fighting 1 job might take 50 AP for level 2 and 75 AP for level 3, but Paragon 2 may take 150 AP for level 2 and 200 AP for level 3.

While one is a certain job, stats for that job increase (so Attack and Defense go up 20% while any fighting job or Magic and Resistance go up 20% while a magic job) and abilities associated with that job are also increased (so if one is a White Mage, their Cure spells will restore 20% more hit points and have 5% better chance of hitting undead). The abilities associated with your job would be bold within your menus and listed first in your abilities.

If you are maximum level in a job, then earned AP will spill over and be used to level up job in the same tier, then whichever of the other two tiers is lower until both are maxed out and only then would they spill over to the Paragon jobs. Also, if the Paragon jobs are not unlocked, the character could get stuck at level 81.

The result of all this would be that one could level up their character quickly by switching between the three basic tiers, but their stats would be very average, however not nearly as much so as in the first 3 games of the series. If one sticks with one tier, it will take them a lot longer to get up to level 27-- but once at level 27, they automatically stop being so specialized, all level 99 characters of a given race will be identical but probably the game functionally ends around level 75 and anything beyond that is bonus challenges. But because the designers will know pretty much what a 75+ level character of each race will look like and the abilities they have, there won't be any "broken builds" that can breeze through such challenges.

Also, equipping abilities should not be necessary. Generally a character menu would have the following options.

Move - Standard movement
Battle - Opens a menu where the first option is always regular attack, but will include all other "hit enemy with weapon plus effect" abilities
Technique - Opens a menu where abilities that do non-magic buffs/debuffs or special movement abilities or thief abilities and other such stuff that doesn't use MP and doesn't just hit with a weapon
Magic - Opens a menu where all your spells are, the ones that use MP.
Item - Standard Item menu should always be available and also has the option to spend your action changing your equipment
Wait - The do nothing but get your turn again faster option

This would mean that all abilities that a character has earned will always be available. They won't be as strong if you aren't the best job for those abilities, but you can still use them. This should generally avoid situations where you end up starting a standard mission and realizing too late it is impossible to accomplish this mission with the character you chose because you didn't change out their second skills after switching jobs-- their old skills will still be there.

Support abilities, to the extent they still exist, would all always be active once earned. This is especially true in the case of those that simply offered additional equipment options and so which of them was "technically" active would depend on your equipment.
Counter abilities might be reduced to 50% effectiveness, but also all always be active once obtained.
Probably in both cases not every one of these abilities that existed in Tactics A2 should return, either because they were straight stat boosts or they granted complete immunity to something.

Equipment
One of the odd things about the equipment in Final Fantasy Tactics games is that you have a random number of slots and whether one can wear both gloves and boots is determined by whether one has equipment on both hands or has a helmet or something. This system should just be cleaned up.

Every character has 7 equipment slots
Hand 1
Hand 2
Head
Body
Gloves
Boots
Accessory

This way everything is clearly spelled out and which slot any given item goes in is predetermined rather than sort of random. Ideally all equipment slots should be filled with something, though depending on the character's job and currently earned support abilities then either one or both hands might be empty. Gloves and boots might be rare or difficult to get early game and acccessories might be difficult to come by until late game and even then mostly earned through quests.

Quest Hubs
In villages or other "social hubs", your character should have the ability to walk around the town and talk to NPCs just like most Final Fantasy games. The NPCs should be the ones delivering a lot of the tips and rumors and notices that appeared as just notes in Tactics A2. Among the NPCs should be characters you can recruit to your Clan and/or those that have unique unrepeatable quests.

Within the hub there would be a quest board. Most of the quests in the game should be found on the quest board. On normal mode these quests should become available either every month or every year. Most quests should not expire once they have been accepted, only certain ones should be time-sensitive. Once these quests have been completed, it will become available again at the start of the next month or at the start of whichever month during the year.

The particular quest board should only display quests for that particular area, and each particular area (on normal mode) will generally have quests only of a certain level. This avoids the situation of anyone accidentally accepting a quest and then realizing that they have to travel clear across the continent to do it only for it to expire before they arrive (all too easy to accidentally do in Tactics A and A2) and it also means that when you recruit characters, they don't have to start at your level and you can bring them back to an appropriate region and have quests their level for them to do.

But the most engaging story side missions should be ones that the player has to seek out by talking to various NPCs in town. Also, once one of these NPC missions has been completed, the NPC may very well disappear from that town and will from that point appear in a different town for the next stage of their quest. This will keep recurring NPCs fresher in the mind of the player.

Also, there would be no need to pay for missions in order to engage in them.


Rival Clans and Colors
Rival clans should be a bigger thing in this game, and to make them more of a presence, they should stand out as unique against NPCs.

The player's Clan would be colored mostly in primary colors, mostly blue with red as secondary and yellow as tertiary colors.
Standard NPCs would be colored mostly in secondary colors, mostly purple with orange as secondary and green as tertiary.

But an additional 7 palettes should exist within the game and 5 should be used for the 5 rival clans. When you see those colors, they would be recognizable as those particular clans. 2 more would be reserved for other special factions that might be enemies beyond the clan system.

Every skin should be designed so that any of the 9 palettes in the game could be switched in.

Rival clans would exist for auctions, which would be one way to get rare equipment, as well as random battles and special story missions. Members of these clans could also be found in the quest hubs and would be immediately recognizable due to their unique colors.



Shops and Items
The Bazaar system is more of a pain than any benefit it brought to the game. Each region should have items appropriate for the quests in that region. It wasn't the worst thing, but between having to kind of know in advance what to unlock and having so many things to unlock-- it is better to just remove the whole middle step of getting loot to trade in to make items available and to simply award the items or the gil to purchase the items. And obviously then not every defeated enemy even needs to drop anything more than gil and AP.

Also, since weapons would not be dictating what skills the character can earn, there can be a lot less of them and it will be fine for stronger and rare ones to be in the game since this wouldn't hamper character progression.

There might still be some loot in the game, but these would be primarily only for the purpose of missions where one was asked to obtain some sort of loot and deliver it to an NPC.


Chocobo/Monster Catching and Breeding
These should be a mini-game. Within the game there can be a Chocobo farm where you can breed your Chocobos and characters can ride them in battle (not just Moogles) which can increase the character's movement and they will probably grant an additional couple abilities and stat boosts. But I imagine there needs to be some sort of additional limitation on them so that a high level party isn't all riding chocobos all the time.

I am not sure if it is best for other monsters to be obtainable as party members, besides the Baknamy which are the least monstrous and most bog-standard monster in the game becoming a regular race mid-way through the game, I think it would probably be best to keep the party focused on characters that can develop through the job system rather than having monsters who won't have access to lots of different jobs.
 
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