sirsystemerror | Nov. 25th, 2024

Nov. 25th, 2024

Decided I was overdue on playing this FF4 hack: Playable Golbez. This hack makes, among other modifications, a few story edits here and there culminating with letting you play as the man in black himself at the very end of it. I needed something chill the day I started it anyway. (And then I mostly spent time on something that will only be relevant later)

Not too sure about these text changes so far from the opening scene. They aren't terrible, this being the botttom rung, but they could be worse I guess. There were also some map changes; one I noticed was beds being in the Baron prison cells. Just flavor so far.

Like most hacks of the SNES version, commands like Decil's Dark Wave were available. Although there were elements of FF2us in there; namely, keeping simple Remedys as a catch-all healing item, though they were way more expensive.

Speaking of expensive, I did the infamous Mist Clip, picking up a Dancing Dagger by selling an X-Potion in town as well as getting the good equipment from Rydia's house. Because I felt like it.

I first started to notice changes when making my way through the watery pass. First, Rydia actually learned more than the three White Magic spells she did in vanilla. I already knew these would still go away later, though. Tellah also had more spells to start with: Scan/SIlence/Cure1 on White, and Poison/Drain/Toad/Sleep on Black.

More interestingly was Tellah's Guess/Recall. In the vanilla game, this is sad: 15% each of a basic tier 1 spell or toad, 5% each of Break, Bio, Tornado, or Death (which can be amusingly multicast even if the original spell doesn't), and 20% of nothing. 3D improved it to focus on elemental magic (and still 31% of Toad) and even let him pull rare spells out of it, keeping it after Ordeals. Here? I peeked into the editor to see what was up. 20% each of Slow, Hold, or Pig. 5% each of a tier 2 spell. 15% for Break, 10% for Death. It doesn't seem able to fail. Still gimmicky, but nice to gamble on.

There was also the first new instances of new equipment. Believe it or not, vanilla FF4 does not have a basic dagger weapon. This hack added it. Even if I didn't Mist Clip, I wouldn't use this. More amusingly was the Hades Shield. Decil infamously doesn't get a shield upgrade in the Watery Pass compared to getting one for all his other equipment pieces. He does here.

Octomammoth is never a big deal, and was less so with Dancing Dagger. I tried to get a Bolt2 out of Guess, but Tellah just used Slow followed by ineffectual spells. Stupid FF4 not letting you status bosses (except Slow)

Oh, neat. I always thought it was kind of absurd everyone died in Damcyan. There were significantly more survivors in the hack, one soldier saying that the King ordered them to stand down so they'd be spared. I like this change. Also, hey! Just handing you one of the summoning items! These are some of the game's ultra rare drops and really are not worth the trouble for the effort you need to get them. For example, Goblin is weaker than Chocobo. Would this hack change that?

A quick look showed it was 8MP to Chocobo's 4MP. Poking the data showed it had 6 power instead of 4 and the same casting time.

Anna is still among the dead though. Edward's Song had no changes. Antlion Cave was also very similar. With Goblin and Dancing Dagger doing around 400 damage each, Antlion fell easily.

Mt. Hobs had a treasure trove to be picked up. First was the Bomb spell, another one of Rydia's rare summons. It deals damage based off her HP. Then there was the Air Knife. Wind element aside, this was very weak and not worth using, especially because of the third weapon: the Silver Harp. Its power put it just below the level of strength of the illegal Dancing Dagger! It seemed to be both fire and holy elemental. On top of that, it was effective on the same undead enemies all Silver weapons in the vanilla game were. Suddenly, Edward was my best damage dealer!

Speaking of, Rosa was not. I thought here damage on Cocatrices felt low, so I checked and the wind element was indeed removed from arrows. Wind instead seems to be the domain of spears. I'm not sure what to think about that change. It's bad, but why?

Big change in Fabul: I haven't been bringing up shops much, but they have been changing. Here though, the Demon dark knight armor was removed and put in Fabul's treasure rooms instead. Good thing I went to look instead of directly into the gauntlet.

Oh yeah, neat change: Red Mages are in! They would appear scattered around various parts of the game moving forward. Also scholars were in FF4 to begin with, but there were more of them too.

Really? This isn't the luck I wanted in my life, game. I normally wouldn't be able to get this here, but the hack lets these items drop from anything. Said gauntlet was otherwise vanilla. After all that, I could pick up the Cocatrice summon from the treasure room in the throne room. Though Rydia wouldn't be able to use it.

Tiny change in Mysidia: the now Red Mage at the entrance hits Cecil with Mini instead of Toad.

Palom's Bluff returned. And Porom's Tears was modeled after the PSP version, inflicting mass confusion instead of effectively doing nothing.

There was another new knife heading up Mt. Ordeals, but that wasn't important. Scarmiglione was the same as always. But there was a pretty big change with Tellah: contrasted with before, now he was missing some spells! In the original game, he only misses out on Holy, Quake, Flare, and Death (despite the fact that he can Recall Death in the original). The hack did give him Death here, but removed access to tier 3 elemental spells and Tornado as well. He also lost access to Cure4 and Life2. Interesting rebalancing that was going to make the game more difficult.

The Paladin equipment already was questionable in vanilla, but the hack nerfed it while keeping it the same price. As an example, Paladin Armor gives 11 defense in vanilla, 8 defense in the hack. It was already preferable to use the Gaia Gear or Karate Gi which give evasion and stat buffs, but this just makes the decision even more of a no-brainer. Still got the shield since it's cheap and there's nothing else to fill the slot.

Oh, that's a bug all right. Pretty sure this didn't happen in vanilla, either. Looks pretty sick at least, especially compared to his ugly original sprite. Speaking of bugs, there was another one the hack introduced: you could no longer choose your target with Slow. Not even sure how this happened: all the hack seemed to do in the data was change it from split to single target.

Wow, speaking of the gi, it went way up in price in this hack. Still bought Yang one. Probably good balancing, but also a little unneeded? It's like this hack is making a half-hearted effort to do that while also making things easier. I think I prefer that to going all in and ruining things, at least.

Nothing to note in the Old Waterway until the Ancient Sword. Somewhat infamous in the vanilla game, it's weaker than the Legend Sword Pecil starts with. It can inflict Curse on a hit, but 1) it's questionable, 2) it comes at the end of a dungeon and bosses can't suffer it, 3) the next dungeon bans swords. EasyType actually outright replaces it with the Coral Sword, which shreds Cagnazzo. No luck here, it maintained its lower accuracy, so I still stuck with the Legend Sword.

Ha, I see what the hack creator did there. Wrong twin saying it, but still, much more convincing line. I definitely noticed Tellah's missing spealls against the two Baron Castle bosses. Usually, Cagnazzo could be near instantly destroyed. It was a much slower fight with Bolt3/Ice3, but I wouldn't say more difficult: still had more than enough healing to deal with it.

More minor changes: the Black Mage in the tower instead uses Toad instead of Pig. More sensible to use different Black Magic I guess? Also I haven't been mentioning it, but a lot more characters call Cecil by name. Scarmiglione and this little girl in particular.

Now, in Troia came the first major story change. So far, everything had just been text alterations that simply boiled down to rewriting things. Cid's atrocious accent aside, it simply existed - it was not bad fanfic material, but a few lines aside on both sides it never stood out either. Not anymore.

Edward still wants to fight with Cecil. Instead of giving a Twin Harp/Whisperweed, he uses a special technique and projects a shadow of himself with the Twin Harp, effectively rejoining the party! The bad news is, the hacker either didn't know about the shadow party (how SNES works with characters who leave and rejoin), couldn't find a way to implement it (Unprecedented Crisis does and it uses the same tool), or intentionally made him rejoin at level 5. He points this out in the text, saying that he might be rusty.

I took him with me to Eblan to gain at least a few levels instead of rushing directly into things. If you ever have problems going here early in any version of the game, by the way? Just have Tellah multi-cast Break. If he gets it off, everything dies.

Two changes I noticed along the way: Cid had the Throw command. Edge never joins the team, so I guess this makes up for it. And instead of the Blood Lance, a Killer Bow was in the castle. This would be nice for the Magnetic Cave.

I could buy a Wrench in Agart. No one could equip this, however. I assumed it was a flavorful Shuriken change to go with Cid's new ability to Throw, and didn't buy it because it was 5000 gil a shot.

Two new weapons were in the Magnetic Cave. The Nocturne Harp was stronger than the currently unusable Silver and could poison. The Mirage Staff itemcasts Blink. Neat.

I switched Edward back to the Silver Harp for the Dark Elf fight to take advantage of Holy weakness. Result: he was on par with Cid and Yang. Poor Tellah, though. With his tier 3 spells and Tornado cut off, he couldn't do more than 1 damage to the boss. I instead had him use Slow. Didn't take long.

Zot was pretty vanilla. Surprisingly, a couple enemies dropped Sirens and I even got a Dark Sword. Also, Edward "leaves" the party. With Cid's Throw ability, I was able to sneak in some extra damage against Barbarricia while she was spinning.

This has been a hack all right so far. It's a ways off until the main draw of things, but it's good to see there's stuff to tide things over in the meantime. So check back later for the next part.

Next | Index

Heading into the und--wait a minute, what? Rally-ho??? Was the hack maker a big FF9 fan or something, because that is not what it is in any other game. It's instead Tally-Ho later on in Tomra.

I managed the Rydialess against Golbez! Pig bought me the time. Always fun to do. I don't see why she gets to level up, though. There was a change in the cutscene after: instead of a magic hand, Golbez himself rises and takes the crystal himself before poofing.

Unfortunately, the Warp glitch was fixed in the hack. Surprisingly, no Dwarf Axe available to buy in the castle. But there were some new weapons for Rosa to potentially use. Punisher was one such treasure in the castle (or was it in Zot?) that was an okay weapon that cast the Ninja spell Bind when used as an item. Flail was interesting: low accuracy and power, effective on reptiles, giants, slimes, and mages, and could stun things. I just kept her with a bow.

In Babil, ice weapons shredded most of everything. One problem with Rydia, by the way: she hadn't learned any new black magic aside from the tier 2 spells she learned in the event. The hack frontloads her magic, although actually eases up once she starts learning them again. It's the big problem I'll have to contend with in solo Rydia. It was definitely a relief to get Bio a little later!

You ancient beings might find this weird, but a scientific society...I forget the whole of what I wrote there. But yeah. I before E is a damn lie.

Lugae went a little screwy, but it was fine.

At the end came the next big change: instead of Cid going on a suicide bombing run, he drops a Bomb Ring off the Enterprise! He subsequently rejoins the party. Doesn't help with the maintenance though, ha. His men complain that he was lazing at home.

There were a lot of Wrenches to pick up in the Eblan Cave, and even for sale. They definitely replace Shurikens. And give off a funny mental image of some mechanic just dropping them or something. I also bought a Morning Star along the way. Same as the Flail, but stronger. Felt ideal for Rosa for now, those racial bonuses go a long way.

Edge has a different palette for some reason. He looks the same in battle. Unlike in vanilla, he gets toasted before he can use fire on the fire fiend. Rubicante's personality changes to be more arrogant.

The scene afterwards changes; as I mentioned, Golbez replaces Edge. Cid mocks Edge, to which the ninja replies that Rubicante is his to defeat. Kain is like "are you mad?!" and Edge boasts about being a ninja. Rydia tells him to shut up: they lost many friends, and he just cares about his boasting? This gets Edge to apologize, and Cid to mock him more. Cecil points out there's more to this than some vendetta. Cid asks Rosa to heal him to shut him up, Edge also demands it. Rosa gets annoyed but does so. Edge does say his thanks and says he'll scout ahead. He says he'll race us there! Rydia tells him to be careful after he's gone. Cid still doesn't like him.

Instead of him doing a ninja trick, he digs a way inside that the party uses.

The Dwarven Hammer was in the four Mad Ogre chest. Seemed to be effective on giants. Thought it'd be thrown, so I had a fight where Cid was in the back row, oops.

Conveniently, Rosa learned Cure3 steps before reaching the bosses of overworld Babil. The King and Queen still fight, with Edge talking during the scene. However, it's Rydia who gets especially pissed after; Rubicante in turn responds that not even Shiva can pierce his cloak of flame.

When it's down though, she wrecks him pretty bad.

Wow, rare sight! I actually triggered Rubicante's death message! This only happens if you knock him under 1000HP without going to 0. It's very precise.

Afterwards, Edge offers to join, but the chancellor and our party tell him to go help his people in the caves. He does so, but still says he's going to go after Golbez. Rydia is a lot softer to him in this scene, compared to canon where she doesn't really give a damn and tolerates him at best. Did the hack dev ship them or something?

It turns out in this hack that the airship in Babil was stolen from Cid's designs. And he was going to name it the Falcon anyway. It still can't fly over magma.

Going into the infirmiary in the Dwarven Castle reveals that Edge didn't sit still for five minutes before falling into the underground and ending up here somehow. Cid mocks him some more, he claims to be learning about the dwarves, and Rydia defends him again. Sheesh. Cid at least uses this to make him help with the airship remodeling. Though, there's a hint that Rydia's sweet talking is intentional to manipulate him, but even that's out of character.

Over in Tomra, there was new stuff in the shops. Besides the Monkey Wrench which just seemed to be a stronger thing to throw, there was a purchasable Elven Bow and Silence Arrows which would normally be in the Sylph Cave. ColdSnap replaced the Chain Whip: the same power except ice-elemental and casts Flood.

It actually looked like all the ninja magic was scattered as itemcasts. Blitz and Flame cast their own spells, already mentioned Punisher casting Pin, a staff I haven't seen yet casts Smoke, and Mirage Staff was actually the ninja version. Neat. Also, apparently I missed a LOT of itemcasts. The hack gives no indication. But a short list of some that I did miss

- Legend Sword casts..."Staff". I assume this is the same Poisona spell the vanilla things uses. It was replaced with the Basuna Staff which casts the Mythril Staff effect instead.
- Flame/Blizzard Spears have Fire2/Ice2 respectively.
- Actually, Dagger and Air Knife also had the Dancing Dagger itemcast (as would an upcoming one). So there really was no difference in the Mist Clip after all.
- Orhalcon on Mt. Ordeals, meanwhile, used Fire1 instead.
- Nocturne Harp had Poison as an itemcast.
- Most hammers seem to have Quake as an Itemcast, just like Gaia Hammer. Exception being the base Wooden.

Anyway, one problem with heading to the side-dungeons: Rosa hadn't learned Float yet! The hack had messed with learn levels on her, too. She was set to learn it on level 33. Which, actually is only one level later, but point's still the same. Cure3 is another example: 31 vs 28.

My solution was to go in anyway. All I could really do. Wasn't too bad to go directly to the land of summons. Cid itemcasting hammer and Rydia itemcasting Blitz Whip messed up most of the enemies here.

Heh, nice lore tweak here. I assume it's assuming to Flayer?

I tried to fight Ashura with cunning, but it didn't work. So let's talk about ATB mechanics. I'm not sure if this is how it works on later versions, but SNES is totally screwed up. First, an agility anchor is determined. In the vanilla game, this will always be Cecil. If there are multiple, the first Cecil in party slot order is used. If he is not present, the first in party slot order is used. The game takes the anchor's agility×5 and divides it by the character or monster's agility, rounding down and setting it to 1 if either AGI stat is 0. That's how many ATB ticks must pass before they can act. Ashura had a Relative Agility (RA) of 1 with Cecil's current AGI of 24, and everyone else had an RA of 5 (in fact, he will always have an RA of 5 unless he hits 0). He would need to hit at least 27 AGI to slow her down.

So it was into the Sylph Cave. Rosa learned Float for the last battle of it, so damage tiles weren't a threat. The treasure room had a ton of stuff: a Power Shirt (only usable by the girls for some reason), Rune Staff (can't critical, makes sure anything else can't critical because of bugs, bad), Mist Rod (damage boosting!), Zeus Gauntlet (renamed Giant Gauntlet).

But then the last chest suddenly started playing boss music. These things hit stupidly hard, and could use Bad Breath. I tried reflecting it, but it had no effect, unlike the trick to mess up with the Lunarsaurs. Actually killed me once. They seemed to be weak to fire, so Rydia could nuke them with Fire3. Didn't have the Flame equipment though, otherwise Kain would've been able to destroy them too.

Eventually, one fell, and then the other. And this was the reward. Could it be...?

...not gonna lie. This is pretty badass. However, that's all I can really say in its favor. It's effectively a worse Death or Break spell: 40MP vs 30 or 2, 4 casting time vs 2 for both. Higher accuracy, but it hardly makes a difference. It's also single target only.

With Reflect on Rosa, the only thing left to do was deal with the ATB problem. And there was one thing Cecil could use that I had that boosted his AGI over the threshold: the Dancing Dagger! Better still, taking it off did nothing, it's only initial AGI that matters. So he could...well. It was just Rydia attacking with Titan and Kain jumping with the Dancing Dagger. So he was on healing duty.

I used Ashura to buy myself some time to slow Leviathan. She still used FF2 US's odds; i.e. no chance of Protect, even though it is now a White spell. After that? Just attack and heal. Fire3 was the spell of choice for Rydia here. It did the most damage out of all her offensive options. Still would after this: Tsunami has 40 power, tier 3 black magic has 64. Same cast speed, too. Summoning magic is really best on random encounters, but they're still MP inefficient. Especially here where she could spam Blitz for nothing.

That brought me into the Sealed Cave. Unfortunately, the reflect trick didn't work anymore. What the hell?! I don't see why this of all things needed to be nerfed. I'm not even sure what happened; they don't resist KO. Maybe a change with enemy spells on an internal level? But the hack did make them mechs, so Cid could do some real damage. Reflect was still good to stop their Disrupt, but I had to have Cecil use the Dancing Dagger for those AGI related reasons I mentioned.

There was one final hammer in here for Cid, along with the Flandango Sword. The usual Light Sword as well. I had Cecil use that due to its higher accuracy.

Sure enough, Demon Wall was a mech too. It was a bit close, but got it done before it started Crushing.

And the scene on the way out is changed. Instead of Kain being remote mind controlled again, Golbez personally shows up to do it. Then he fails, so he just uses Pressure - status resistances be damned - walks up, and grabs it.

Yeah, this guy ships them. I hate it. Like, this is Playable Golbez. It did advertise some rewrites, but before it was just sprucing up some of the more poorly worded parts. This is changing things entirely. Ugh.

Edge naturally didn't speak during the Yang sidequest. No one did in his place. With Throw on Cid who was about to leave the party per Cecil's request to gather everyone to help just in case, there was no point in a knife/spoon as a reward. So instead, Sheila gave the Assassin Dagger as a reward. I saved Odin for later...

The scene with meeting Fusoya mostly implements extra canon text, such as namedropping Cecilia (Cecil's mom and namesake). However, Zemus is a scientist in this hack. Okay then.

Fusoya came with 50% more MP. With him, I noticed that compared to its casting time of 0 in the original game, Flare had a cast time of 3 here. Probably deserved it. Still the best black spell to cast. His Regen got buffed: restored 100HP per tick and no longer locked him down for the duration.

Nothing different in Bahamut's Cave. He fell no problem.

Kain's initial equipment on his third rejoining was scattered around this room in the Giant. The Firebute was in the Last Arm chest. Nothing to the bosses in the giant. Gungnir was changed to be lightning element, which helped against Cagnazzo and the mechanical enemies.

There's massive changes to the scene after. It goes mostly the same except for explicitly pointing out that Golbez's mind control was briefly shaken after Tellah's Meteor. Then Edge shows up for vengeance. Rydia talks him down. Golbez is prepared to accept his fate, but only after he stops Zemus.

Edge is ready to beat him down. Fusoya sense great potential and invites Edge along. He's startled, but goes along with it. Golbez begs to be taken along, but Fusoya refuses: Zemus already controlled him once, it could not only happen again, but could happen to Cecil too.

They leave, Cecil says it's time for them all to go.

Golbez is again prepared to answer for his crimes. However, Kain of all people sticks up for him; after all, he was controlled as well. Cecil can't really remember his brother from when he was young, and Golbez had his memories stolen (canon). He acknowledges being forgiven but doesn't think the rest of the world will agree. Cecil has a better idea: come with them to the moon. That will be his chance to redeem himself, and they need his help. They'll stop Zemus from taking them over with the power of trust. And besides, Edge and Fusoya are the ones who really need help. There's no bit with the girls being shoved aside and staying.