Re: [PSX/PC] Alternate F...

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Well this isnt my first game over but its the first one that just made me put down the controller.

Desert Palace. I ferning hate it.

But this isn't Unleashed. I didn't spend hours getting Garnet, Eiko, Vivi and Quina Half MP.. I didn't stock up on 60 Ethers.  I didn't think I needed to be super prepared or to worry about random encounters.

And what happens? I go into a random encounter with those two floaty jackasses. I see things are looking grim as Vivi is dying and losing MP and not moving which I hadn't noticed. I tell Garnet to just summon them to death. CAN'T CONCENTRATE. fern, now she's dead. Okay, Eiko, Fenrir them. Nope, now she's Frozen. And then she and Quina died to Bio.

ferning status effects. I have a lot of my AP sunk into  Auto Haste for everyone. AI should care more about Antibody or even Body Temp but there are otehr things I wanted. I thought I could handle it. I was handling it, up until this fight. fern.

This has always been my least favorite dungeon in this game. I was right near the end, too. Goddam.
 
Luck was on my side I guess. I beat Silver Dragon, Garland and Kuja all on my first try, and got all their steals very quickly. That one attack of Kuja's was nasty though, that reduced everyone's HP permanently to 1. Luckily I got the Light Robe before he had managed to inflict it on more than Zidane and Quina.

EDIT:

Very interesting gimmick with the Tiamant fight. Thank goodness I got; the Grand Helm early. Now I need to grind for Hades. Everyone is only around Level 50 and I don't think thats enough.

EDIT 2:

Okay I beat Hades without grinding although I dare say there was a lot of luck involved. If he starts with Powering Sword and steals Remedies than uses Curse, you're just plain old screwed. I don't think there's anything you can do there.

Fortunately for me,  on my successful run,  he just used Freeze and Mustard Bomb and his sword attaks. Between Zidane having Trance right off the bat, Steiner's Sword Dance and Garnet's Bahamut, we beat him pretty fast.

I gave up on stealing the Robe of Lords. You cannot screw around in this fight or risk losing all your best items. Besides, I can Synth one anyway, or steal it from Quale. At least I could in the old game, dunno if you changed this.
 
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Congrats ! If you keep winning, then it can't be all about luck :p
I'm quiet sure I didn't change the different ways to get the Robe of Lords ; I did that for the Protect Rings but not for the Robe.

That's a good thing you can beat Hades without grinding too much. When I changed the Excalibur II requirements, I admit that I didn't think a lot about the feasability of "beating Hades before 14 hours". It seemed possible but since I don't speedrun and I don't have a good idea of how much time the difficulty increase would demand, I'm not sure it's actually possible ^^"

Next come Kraken and Lich :D
 
Yeah, I don't much like speedruns either. It feels like it defeats the point of RPGs, which, for me at least, is to give you something to do for like a week.

Out of curiosity, how does your Ozma stack up to Unleashed's? I could never beat Ozma there. It was all that damned Curse's fault. It did crazy damage and 9/10 wiped my party straight away. My poor Level 77 party was no match for him. If we could ever survive, damaging it wuldn't have been an issue but we just couldn't.

Is Lich's Final Sentence dependent on someone having Auto Haste on? That's a nasty surprise.

Trance Kuja was a fairly simple affair. Necron beat me, though. He's just so fast and Grand Cross' status effects can really pile on you. Still, I'm pretty sure he's beatable. Just need to be more prepared. No real way to protect against Zombie or Berserk but I can at least guard against Body Temp. I'll try him again later.

EDIT:

I wish I had my original team... Maybe sub out Freya for Quina but otherwise, Eiko is WAY better than Garnet for t his and Amarant' support abilities, plus Throw, would be really handy.

As it is, I'm at the mercy of waiting for Mighty Guard to dissipate so I can do real damage and I have to pray I get Reflect on him before he uses Regen on himself. If Eiko was here, I could Dispel all of that and this fight be so much simpler.

I also don't understand the turn order. Sometimes he just gets no less than four turns in a row. What can I do about a Blue Shockwave followed by a Meteor? The answer is nothing.
 
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Ozma can still be very random and say "no" to a perfectly prepared team. There are however a few tricks possible to lower that random aspect and make him more accessible. Still a tense fight (contrary to Necron, I didn't increase his HP).

Yeah, I thought it was a shame that Dispel was so useless in the normal game, so here it can take care of a few problems ^^
Necron's ATB is a bit tricky since he actually has 4 ATB bars. The main one is the fastest and casts Blue Shockwave and Grand Cross (and Neutron Ring in vanilla ; here it became a counter). The other ATBs use respectively the -aga spells, the Cure/Buff spells and the Flare/Holy/Meteor megaspells. So yeah, you can't do a lot if he gets several turns at once ^^
But knowing that, you can care a bit more of the ATB trick : it's not always a good idea to let the ATB run while Necron is casting.
 
I also don't understand the turn order. Sometimes he just gets no less than four turns in a row. What can I do about a Blue Shockwave followed by a Meteor? The answer is nothing.
Necron's ATB is a bit tricky since he actually has 4 ATB bars. The main one is the fastest and casts Blue Shockwave and Grand Cross (and Neutron Ring in vanilla ; here it became a counter). The other ATBs use respectively the -aga spells, the Cure/Buff spells and the Flare/Holy/Meteor megaspells. So yeah, you can't do a lot if he gets several turns at once ^^
But knowing that, you can care a bit more of the ATB trick : it's not always a good idea to let the ATB run while Necron is casting.
To further elaborate on how Necron works: if you take a look at the Necron battle in Hades Workshop you'll realise that Necron is not alone in this fight. He is accompanied by 3 Dummy enemies that have no name displayed in-game. Furthermore, they are un-targetable, invisible and invincible, so the player has no way of knowing that they are even there. Now here's the deal: Necron himself has really only 3 different attacks: Blue Shockwave, Grand Cross, and Neutron Ring. All other attacks that you see in this battle are performed by those 3 dummy enemies, giving the player the illusion that Necron is capable of acting multiple times in a row (which, in reality, he is not).

This is also the reason why you don't see any body animation of Necron when one of the aforementioned spells is cast. Blue Shockwave, Grand Cross, and Neutron Ring are the only attacks where Necron actually moves his body, but for all the other spells, he just stands still because he is not the one casting them.
 
Update.
A Steam version of the mod is now available. It doesn't differ much from the PSX version except that Beatrix can be recruited at the end of disc 3.

I've tested it from new game to the end and didn't encounter bugs, but there may still be. Don't hesitate to tell me if you find one.
There may be bugs if you're using the cheats though.
 
Update.
A Steam version of the mod is now available. It doesn't differ much from the PSX version except that Beatrix can be recruited at the end of disc 3.

I've tested it from new game to the end and didn't encounter bugs, but there may still be. Don't hesitate to tell me if you find one.
There may be bugs if you're using the cheats though.
I tried to patch the Steam verision just as you said, but i get a black screen right of the bat. Without the modded files it works fine.
 
Hum... Maybe your game is not up-to-date (I think that would bug).
Remove the mod, open Steam and check for FF9 updates, then try again.

I just tested in case the uploaded version was somehow corrupted. But no, it worked fine for me.
 
hey

will the booster cheats still work if i add your steam mod to the ff9 steam version
 
I have the same issue with my game just freezing at a black screen after copying the files over and yes my game is up to date.
p0data2.bin and p0data7.bin and the game can be run, the problems start happening as soon as resources.assets and Assembly-CSharp.dll get thrown in.


Semi-Related: Hades Workshop also loads data really weird with all spells being shown as having a power of 255 with all elements checked off.
 
You're other problem is indeed related Raven, thx for mentionning it.

It means quiet for sure that we don't have the same version of FF9 Steam. I double-checked and my game is said to be up-to-date. Either yours is not, either I screw up something and my game can't update anymore (that'd be strange though since most people that left comments succeed in installing the mod).
There's also the possibility that you used Albeoris's Memoria tool. Remember they are not compatible (both Alternate Fantasy and Hades Workshop).

You may need to check that your game is up-to-date with the Steam client. Sometimes, the update is not automatic and doesn't trigger just by running the game.
 
Hallo!!
First of all, thank you for such a fantastic mod.
I only want to know, where is the orichalco? I cannot find it :(
 
Thanks Manerr, glad you enjoy it :)

It's not my spirit to give away infos like this ; the mod was partly done to encourage the player to explore the game anew.
I can say that there are two orichalcons in the mod, both of them are different from the original game and one of them is missable.
 
Well Tirlititi, you have motivated me to buy FFIX on Steam. To be frank, I think your mod of FFIX is not only the best mod I've found, it's better than vanilla. I really want to replay this again. You made FFIX so much more fun and interesting.

And now, with it on PC, even my godawful computer can probably record decent footage of the Beatrix fight. I especially want to get the Burmecia boss battle which your mod made one of the best fights in the game. Having to actually "win" was such a surprise yet it was also thrilling and the fight itself was just the right level of difficult. It combined with the music and background to really sell Beatrix as this super badass.

I never did defeat Necron in my last run, nor Ozma nor the Yans. But I will this time! Gonna try a different party composition. With Beatrix, that just adds extra incentive to give this another go.
 
Question, though. Necron is a huge challenge but in both this and Unleashed, Trance Kuja was a bit of a joke.

Do you have any plans of altering your mod to change up certain fights or whatever? I really would like to see what should have been the final boss be more of a challenge.

Also I just now realized something very important.

Is there a way to save in this game between Trance Kuja and Necron? Because I just realized, since I'm gonna be getting this for PC next, I won't have save states anymore. I do not foresee me beating Necron on my first or even second or third try. I had a save state ready to go right before the fight in my last run which saved me an unbelievable amount of time.
 
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Yep, Trance Kuja is a bit disappointing. I just had no idea for this fight but hopefully, some update of my tool will allow to have more varied abilities (along the same line, I want to make Zidane's Transcend skill able to target any character whose Trance bar is over 50% or such).

For Necron's save state, you have the auto-save which should do just fine. If you die, you can just use the "Continue" option to get to the hill of despair right after beating Trance Kuja (you have to do all the cutscene and menus again though).

Thanks a bunch for your kind words ; appreciated :)
 
Update to v4.2. Fixed a few bugs and added Beatrix supporting abilities / AP learning feature.
I also shared the .hws file so you can see how I did things and customize your own version.
 
hey u think u can help me make my mod work on steam version LOL
 
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