Final Fantasy II Restored

[Chicken Knife]

Here's a dialogue bit I'm almost certain is incorrect. After rescuing Hilda and blowing up the Dreadnought, you return to Altair, and the king passes away after telling you about Ultima and the Dragoons of Deist. Afterwards, all the denizens of HQ are lamenting the death of the king, but when you visit Hilda, she says this:



I'm certain this is grabbing the wrong text. Why would she be laughing?

[redmagejoe]

This is correct behavior. It foreshadows a game event that happens shortly after. In fact, I believe one of the NPCs around town or in the keep mentioned Hilda behaving strangely.

[Chaos Rush]

Here's a dialogue bit I'm almost certain is incorrect. After rescuing Hilda and blowing up the Dreadnought, you return to Altair, and the king passes away after telling you about Ultima and the Dragoons of Deist. Afterwards, all the denizens of HQ are lamenting the death of the king, but when you visit Hilda, she says this:



I'm certain this is grabbing the wrong text. Why would she be laughing?

It's correct, but if I told you why, it would spoil something in the story lol

[Chicken Knife]

I have played this before, but I forgot what happens, so thank you for not spoiling. 

Anyway, I found a real bug.

When the cockatrices around Mysidia hit me with the stone status, the battle text says "stopped". Since stop is a status, this should read "petrified".

[redmagejoe]

I believe Chaos Rush chose "stopped" for space, as there's no other "Stop" status in Final Fantasy II at least, and "petrified" is too long, and "stoned" is, well... yeah.

I can see if space can be created in a bank to make room for petrified, but I wouldn't hold out hope.

[Chicken Knife]

Good luck finding an area to expand. While the stop spell status may technically be "hold", the association with the "stop" spell is still counterintuitive. Agreed on "stoned" not being the best choice. "stopped" is 7 characters. If 8 characters fits, perhaps "ossified"? Otherwise, using the word "stone" might be the best choice, even if it breaks the convention of past tense form.

[ScarabEnigma]

Anytime in ff2, even in demiforce translate, you get hit with petrify effect, it says stopped, similarly all instant death spells say collapsed after [enemy] fell message appears. Meanwhile the real stop spell in ff2 is actually just stun spell but with matter element instead of body.

I'm pretty sure there is space to change the stopped into petrify, or just edit stopped to say stone instead.

One thing I recall is within the text unused by ff2 when viewing demiforce rom with the right table file, is there exists battle messages that go unused, the ones i recall of the top of my head.

'Wall faded'. This presumably means wall spell effect was intended to wear off either eventually or after blocking a spell, Reflect, its successor which debuted in ff3 which is also sometimes called Wall, does only last one spell before the effect wears off.

'Split up'. This message seems tied to the unused spell called Split found in the data, its very possible for all we know that they attempted the splitting enemy effect in 2 but never actually got progress done there.

[abw]

What I'm hoping to change is the "base growth barrier for type of skill" constants here. Where are those located in the ROM, and which values correspond to which skill type?

The code for post-battle growth starts around $05:$A546 (0x016556) in an unmodified ROM; the base growth amounts are at $05:$AC35 - $05:$AC38 and correspond to weapons, spells, Evasion, and Magic Resist in that order. The base growth barrier is 10 (#$0A) for each skill type, so (base growth amount for type of skill) - (base growth barrier for type of skill) works out to 0 for weapons, +2 for spells, -3 for Evasion, and +4 for Magic Resist.

however if the dual wield bug were fixed based on how it functions in later versions, then it'd be possible to achieve more than 255 attack via dual wielding, which should apply both attack values together.

I've never actually played any of the later versions (which sometimes puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to determining what's a bug and what isn't), so I'm not sure how dual wielding works there. In the NES version, there are separate calculations and RAM slots for primary and secondary hand attack power, so it doesn't look like they were intended to be combined into a single attack stat; I'm guessing the intent might have been to run through the damage calculation once with the primary weapon and then again with the secondary weapon, but it's hard to say for sure.

weapon type doesn't determine two handed required, rather some other thing does

That other thing is a check for whether the item ID of the weapon you're equipping is >= the item ID for the first bow (#$68). The code for that lives around $0E:$B160 for the Equip screen and $0C:$A0B5 for the in-battle Item screen.

Evasion percent for physical or magical can exceed 99% [...] and of course overflow can occur

This one is fixed.

multiple pieces of equipment that increase the same stat by 10 cannot stack cumulatively.
  - its also possible for stat boost via equipment to enable a stat to exceed 99 in value

These are both fixed too.

the reason why the black tiles at the bottom left corner of screen don't flash

a black background much more suited for portrait depictions

Why is it that the chocobo in chocobo's forest appears and disappears and only is facing frontward while doing a side walk?

I also noticed these, but I've only looked in to a few of the graphical issues.

when hitting a elemental weakness, the spell automatically hits target [...]

As far as I can tell, all of those effects appear to be intended.

Even if enemy has 0 morale stat (the stat that affects chances of running away), high enough party hp will still cause them flee

Yup, the only thing that will prevent enemies from running away from a party with sufficiently high HP is the bit in the formation data that makes a battle inescapeable. This doesn't appear to be a bug, just a (perhaps unfortunate) design choice.

the damage formula for Tnad, Wave, and Quak is same as standard, except it ignores enemy magic defense and elemental resistance, although absorb still works.

These spells were messed up in multiple ways. We've got them working again, hopefully fairly close to how they ought to work.

I read there is consideration to demake the later port bgms

This might not be too hard, but I've spent even less time looking at audio than graphics, so it would take some further investigation.

Well, that's all that comes to mind once again. not sure if ill have anything else worth mentioning for the time being.

Thanks again - if you do come up with anything else to add, let us know!

I'm certain this is grabbing the wrong text. Why would she be laughing?

If you're really curious, the Japanese for that line is "うふふ......".

I can see if space can be created in a bank to make room for petrified, but I wouldn't hold out hope.

One option to get more space is to store only one of the duplicate strings (e.g. the " up!" strings) and update the pointers to point to that single string instead of having each pointer point to a separate copy of the same string.

[redmagejoe]

I'll look into cleaning up the Chaos Rush translation a little if I find some time, to address the Petrified thing.

@abw: Having played the ports, I can tell you that dual wielding in the remakes involve the convention seen in some of SNES games with dual-wielding, with an animation for the main hand attack (up to 16 hits) and then another animation for the off hand (up to 16 hits), with damage numbers displayed separately. It sounds like what you found in the code leans towards that behavior even this far back, so perhaps some day that could be realized via Restored.

[Topaz Light]

The code for post-battle growth starts around $05:$A546 (0x016556) in an unmodified ROM; the base growth amounts are at $05:$AC35 - $05:$AC38 and correspond to weapons, spells, Evasion, and Magic Resist in that order. The base growth barrier is 10 (#$0A) for each skill type, so (base growth amount for type of skill) - (base growth barrier for type of skill) works out to 0 for weapons, +2 for spells, -3 for Evasion, and +4 for Magic Resist.

Thanks, I think I've found it!

Is it the "0A 0C 07 0E" from 0x00016C45 to 0x00016C48? I'll admit that my knowledge of larger-scale hex notation is a bit lacking, since I've mostly used HxD which just displays the raw offset.

EDIT: As for the "Petrified" issue, there's a slimmer lower-case "a" tile near the end of Chaos Rush's font graphic tiles that could be repurposed into an "if" or "ri" squish tile or something. Though, you'd have to find all the places that tile is used in any text and replace it with the standard lower-case "a" tile everywhere were you to do that.

[redmagejoe]

It might be in your best interest to look at abw's disassembly (linked in the first post) and compare what you've found with the offsets he gave rather than attempting to tinker purely with the binary. I spent a lot of time reviewing the commented txt and making tweaks accordingly when I was working on this project.

[Chicken Knife]

If you're really curious, the Japanese for that line is "うふふ......".

Thanks for the Japanese here, abw. I've ran this by my Japanese speaking translation partner. This is specifically a creepy, naughty, evil kind of laugh. "Hahaha..." on the other hand is a more general type, although the ellipses do give it a hint of foreboding. We would have gone with something like "Heh heh heh..."  just to make the sinister aspect clearer.

I'm about halfway through the game at this point. The only real grinding I've done has been for MP, mostly for my black mage to be able to get through dungeons without having to attack and lower her INT. The passive growth on both weapons and magic feels absolutely perfect on a standard playthrough, and it makes me enjoy the game for the first time in my life. I genuinely feel like the game stands proudly with FF1 and FF3 now. I'm getting into the stretch where statuses on enemy attacks get really brutal. It's completely out of hand at times, but old school is old school. I'm not sure I'd want it changed.

My only real annoyance continues to be feeling compelled to cure statuses before battles conclude in order to get my growth.
May 02, 2021, 06:49:35 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Also, something seems up with the behavior of "confuse". If it effects a character after they attack in a round, I'm seeing it wear off before the character's next turn. It should be effecting them at least one action, right?

[Chaos Rush]

Thanks for the Japanese here, abw. I've ran this by my Japanese speaking translation partner. This is specifically a creepy, naughty, evil kind of laugh. "Hahaha..." on the other hand is a more general type, although the ellipses do give it a hint of foreboding. We would have gone with something like "Heh heh heh..."  just to make the sinister aspect clearer.

I'd like to provide some further context regarding this - when I did the initial FF2 retranslation in 2015, I compared every line with the GBA version (I didn't extract the GBA script or anything, but actually played the JP Famicom version and English GBA version side-by-side), and in the GBA version she says "Hee hee..."

Now, I don't remember if I originally had it as "Hee hee.." or not, but the reason why I changed it was purely due to space reasons, as how I went about it was:
1) copy the GBA text
2) read the Famicom text and try and decipher what info was "new" to the GBA version and remove that
3) rephrase it as short as possible
4) repeat step 3
5) work on the translation more and realize you've run out of space. Repeat steps 3-4 for pretty much every line in the game. Step 5 was reached at least three times

So basically several times I had to go back and rephrase everything as short as possible, and since [ha] is a DTE char in my initial version, putting "Hahaha" is only 4 bytes while "Hee hee" would've taken 6 bytes as [H][e][e][ ][he][e] (yes I just checked the DTE table for the last version I worked on). I had to pull every trick to try and compress the space as much as possible (with the knowledge available at the time), and even reconstructed the DTE table several times by using an online tool to analyze the whole script to come up with lists of the most frequently used two-letter pairings.

tldr;
-I went with "Hahaha" rather than "Tee hee" because [ha] was in the DTE table so it would've saved space and every byte I could save made a huge difference.

I'm sure if you get your buddy to analyze the script they might find a lot more questionable choices, but I just want to throw it out there that I had to compress the crap out of it, and every byte I could save made a huge difference. (Though I must admit that if I were to redo the project today it would be done somewhat better since my Japanese has improved a lot since then, but I have no intention to go back to this. Well, maybe once I finish my indie game project I might fix some issues with the FF3 translation, but for now I'm busy with other stuff lol)

I just thought I'd explain some context, is all

[abw]

@abw: Having played the ports, I can tell you that dual wielding in the remakes involve the convention seen in some of SNES games with dual-wielding, with an animation for the main hand attack (up to 16 hits) and then another animation for the off hand (up to 16 hits), with damage numbers displayed separately. It sounds like what you found in the code leans towards that behavior even this far back, so perhaps some day that could be realized via Restored.

Hmm, I was thinking of just displaying the combined number of hits and damage, but it's interesting that later versions display each weapon's impact separately. The original game already displays animations for both weapons, so that helps. Do you know whether both weapons can inflict status effects and how those are displayed?

Thanks, I think I've found it!

Is it the "0A 0C 07 0E" from 0x00016C45 to 0x00016C48? I'll admit that my knowledge of larger-scale hex notation is a bit lacking, since I've mostly used HxD which just displays the raw offset.

Yup, that sounds like the place! The 0x016556 is a ROM file address including the iNES header, and $05:$A546 is the corresponding RAM address ($A546 in bank $05). If you're looking in the patched version, just be aware that where those bytes end up being located in the patched version can change from version to version depending on what else the patch changes.

Thanks for the Japanese here, abw.

No problem - I thought you might be interested .

I'm about halfway through the game at this point. The only real grinding I've done has been for MP, mostly for my black mage to be able to get through dungeons without having to attack and lower her INT.

I also found MP growth to be the only reason for grinding with passive growth enabled (farming Wizards for Osmose is a different story; if you're going to do that, I recommend pillaging before you burn [/vague hint]). If you want to achieve skill levels higher than passive growth will take you, however, there's still plenty of grinding required.

The passive growth on both weapons and magic feels absolutely perfect on a standard playthrough, and it makes me enjoy the game for the first time in my life.

This was a pleasant surprise for me too - I didn't know how much tweaking the basic idea would need, but the first attempt seems to have worked out pretty well.

I'm getting into the stretch where statuses on enemy attacks get really brutal. It's completely out of hand at times, but old school is old school. I'm not sure I'd want it changed.

Evasion and Magic Resist are your friends here; if you need some extra help on those fronts, Blink/Shell come in quite handy.

My only real annoyance continues to be feeling compelled to cure statuses before battles conclude in order to get my growth.

Yup, that part is definitely annoying. On the plus side, it helps you get your Esuna level up .

Also, something seems up with the behavior of "confuse". If it effects a character after they attack in a round, I'm seeing it wear off before the character's next turn. It should be effecting them at least one action, right?

Not necessarily. Confuse has a 20% chance to wear off at the end of each round, so if you're lucky, characters who are inflicted with Confuse after they act might recover before the start of the next round. Confuse is by far the most dangerous temporary ailment, so be happy any time it does wear off!

tldr;
-I went with "Hahaha" rather than "Tee hee" because [ha] was in the DTE table so it would've saved space and every byte I could save made a huge difference.

Been there, done that, didn't have enough left over to buy the t-shirt . There's very little free space in the Final Fantasy II ROM; the saving grace for all the coding changes I've made is how much free space I could create by rewriting the original code, which tends to be quite inefficient (need an extra thousand bytes? no problem, just replace these four 256-byte lookup tables with 20 bytes of code ).

[ScarabEnigma]

Hmm, I was thinking of just displaying the combined number of hits and damage, but it's interesting that later versions display each weapon's impact separately. The original game already displays animations for both weapons, so that helps. Do you know whether both weapons can inflict status effects and how those are displayed?

FF3 nes did do combined number of hits and damage and likely FF2 was intending such but had a error with enabling the offhand to do such. I've played the later ports a fair bit of times, debuffs in future ports are displayed in icons in the upper right corner of the target, and its possible inflict status effects with either weapon.

also, is the ripper bug by chance fixed, aka the ripper effect which does 20 damage per hit additionally when attacking?
I also wonder if there's any plans to adjust the damage formula for hp/mp drain from 1/16th of target max hp/mp into something a lot less busted.

[redmagejoe]

Ripper bug has been fixed. I know it's a rather lengthy read, but I'd encourage you to check out the readme on the submission page to see a list of bugs we found and fixed. Anything that hasn't been fixed, but has been found, is listed on the first post of this thread. If you discover anything not covered there, please post about it here so we can document it. I'm really happy at the sheer number of bugs we found that weren't even documented prior to this project, and that the majority of them were fixed.

@abw: I pulled up the old PPSSPP again and rushed on a new game to Poft. The boat stays at Paloom if you haven't paid for a trip, and if you talk to the guy in Poft who usually sells you a boat ticket, he simply says the following.



If you pay for a ride and then talk to the NPC again, you get the following message:



Meanwhile, in the NES version, even if you just bought a ticket the NPC will continue to prompt you and take money from you ad infinitum. There's absolutely 0 check for whether you've bought a ticket or not, even though there has to be some sort of variable or flag set that allows you to board the boat in the first place. I think that this is bit higher on the priority list, so I'm going to move it up on the first post.

I think it's safe to assume this works vice versa, which means that adding another message, or simply not taking the player's money, would be the "official" bug fix solution here. From a design standpoint, I think that this is a TERRIBLE approach, as it does indeed suggest that you're the only people in the game world using the boat (immersion break much?), but my perspective doesn't change the fact that this is the official remake behavior. Your current implementation for Restored works fine since it's a Quality of Life improvement patch, but we should think about how we could work room for another message or two into the lookup table for Bug Fix. Though since I doubt it takes the "already bought the ticket" situation into account, maybe we should roll back that change and think of something that works for both.



As for the dual-wielding, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how the combat in the remake differs. With fully maxed out characters end game, Leon wielding Masamune and an Aegis Shield is getting 31 hits, god knows how. Meanwhile, when making him dual-wield, he does 15 hits, the damage is displayed, then another 15 hits, and that damage is displayed. So at the very least that's how the remake handles dual-wielding. I'd probably ignore the 31-hits thing. Guy also got 23 hits, so I have no idea what's happening with all the single-wield + shields.

EDIT: Further testing reveals that removing a shield seems to drop these characters from up to 32 hits down to up to 16, so in remakes they clearly added some incentive to having shields equipped beyond evasion. That can be ignored for our purposes. Barehanded, despite "doubling" EXP gain in our version, only does up to 16 hits in the remake. Essentially the offhand is considered as "empty" regardless what's in the main hand. So in the remakes, you're either dual-wielding for two separate sets of hits, probably for strategic purposes like making use of two different leveled weapon skills or their effects, or just due to limited availability of "strongest" items, while using a shield essentially doubles the offensive power of your main hand weapon while giving you an evasion boost. This second benefit seems counterintuitive and like a "casual-friendly" design choice, so again, it can be ignored for our purposes. Choosing defense over offense is a good choice for the original to put on the player, though currently that benefit doesn't exist for dual-wielding and shields only provide a spell success penalty.

[ScarabEnigma]

Shields in gba and psp ports are bugged actually, they visually apply extra hits, but in actuality, you still only hit for what your weapon hits for. Shield equipping provides no actual hit count bonus to overall attacking. Meanwhile dual wielding , its still a overall attack bonus, its just you need very specific equips to maintain a higher evasion rate or to really maximize damage output, cap your agility stat and evade lvl to 8 (Firion for example gets automatic 99+ agility from his labyrinth ultimate weapon, enabling him to achieve max evade wielding the ragnarok)

pretty much the weapon wielding has their differing boons
weapon with shield, standard attack bonus (atk bonus = str/4 and accuracy, evasion bonus
weapon with no shield, standard accuracy, greater attack bonus (atk bonus = str/2, less evasion
weapon with weapon, reduced accuracy (moreso for offhand), standard atk bonus, some or none evasion bonus (depends on what you equip, defender and main gauche provide high innate evade% up for sword and dagger respectively, while firion's ragnarok automatically raises strength by 50 and agility to 99 where 1 agi = 1 evade% and accuracy % = str) 

Also, in the future ports starting from the gba version, they removed the int/spr penalties from weapons, they didn't do the same with shields and armor though. I've also deduced that the growth curve was changed to 10 points to skill lvl up, with +10 more required added per each lvl up, capping to classic 100 points at lvl 10. Though I cannot confirm that last one without someone looking into gba code itself.

[abw]

I also wonder if there's any plans to adjust the damage formula for hp/mp drain from 1/16th of target max hp/mp into something a lot less busted.

I don't mind this so much on enemy attacks given the comparatively low number of successful hits enemies can make, but I agree that having this effect on the Blood sword is a balance problem, especially if you're abusing both Blood swords at once. I haven't really considered what I'd like to replace the effect with, though... maybe limit it to 1/16 per attack instead of 1/16 per hit?

@abw: I pulled up the old PPSSPP again and rushed on a new game to Poft.

Oooh, pretty pictures!

If the original game came with separate messages to use in those cases, using them would absolutely be the best solution. Absent such messages... automatically moving the ferry removes the need for the first message, and while not charging the player when they try to buy extra tickets doesn't help the text any, it at least fixes half of the problem the second message addresses.



For dual-wielding, I'm thinking the visible effects should be:

• character does the existing 1-/2-hand attack animation
• # of hits, damage, and special effects from primary hand are displayed
• # of hits, damage, and special effects from secondary hand are displayed only if the secondary hand holds a weapon
• monster dies (including death animation and message) if current HP <= 0

with the internal calculations happening in the same order (this is important since any hand's attacks could end up healing the enemy). The secondary hand would not make an attack if it is empty or holds a shield.

For reference, a character's attack stats are currently calculated as:

• Accuracy: primary hand gets +STR, secondary hand gets +STR/2.
• Power: wielding a single item with 2 hands gets +STR/2, fighting bare-handed has a total of skill level * 8 + STR/2, wielding two items gets +STR/4 for the primary item and +STR/8 for the secondary item.

and that's probably how I'd leave them until we can play test to see how they feel.

What do we know about the behaviour of buffs and debuffs in the remakes? Do Aura/Berserk/Blind/Curse/Haste/Slow apply equally to both weapons? If yes, then we're looking at a maximum attack damage output of 64 hits at a power of 275, which comes out to a total of 52,800 damage.

[ScarabEnigma]

I don't mind this so much on enemy attacks given the comparatively low number of successful hits enemies can make, but I agree that having this effect on the Blood sword is a balance problem, especially if you're abusing both Blood swords at once. I haven't really considered what I'd like to replace the effect with, though... maybe limit it to 1/16 per attack instead of 1/16 per hit?

I was thinking it'd be better to not the hp drain effect affect target hp directly and instead do user recovery based on damage dealt. It'd still allow enemies to do potent drain recovery effects without it practically being a very nasty defense ignoring hp damage incursion.

The greater issue however is mp drain uses similar formula as hp drain, unless it has a unique space for it's own formula, there may be conflict. If it has unique space, maybe do mp damage and recovery equal to 10% of damage dealt to balance it out. Although, the only reason to do mp drain edits would be if a hack gave mp drain to a weapon.

For dual-wielding, I'm thinking the visible effects should be:

• character does the existing 1-/2-hand attack animation
• # of hits, damage, and special effects from primary hand are displayed
• # of hits, damage, and special effects from secondary hand are displayed only if the secondary hand holds a weapon
• monster dies (including death animation and message) if current HP <= 0

with the internal calculations happening in the same order (this is important since any hand's attacks could end up healing the enemy). The secondary hand would not make an attack if it is empty or holds a shield.

That sounds like the perfect way to execute dual wield display 

What do we know about the behaviour of buffs and debuffs in the remakes? Do Aura/Berserk/Blind/Curse/Haste/Slow apply equally to both weapons? If yes, then we're looking at a maximum attack damage output of 64 hits at a power of 275, which comes out to a total of 52,800 damage.

I may have played the ports but i never really got down to those inner details, I have a end game save and can perhaps do testing on the psp port. It's likely they do apply equally, but that slight difference in accuracy for offhand may still result in a difference in damage total.

[redmagejoe]

Any testing you're willing to do on the PSP version would be immensely appreciated Scarab, if you want to give us mechanical details to inform Restored's design. I just don't have the time any more to do so. I've tried to do a little light video game streaming with my limited free time to not get burnt out from work, and as much as I want to dedicate that free time here, diving back into assembly seems less appealing a prospect when I think about staring at code all day, and then staring at different code between that time. That said, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel with my workload that had increased due to the pandemic. There's a possibility that I'll be able to dive back into this before too long.



@abw: I tend to agree with you on ease of implementation. In a way, it seems you're paying to "have the boat moved" to your current location as well as have passage. In this way, it's about perception, and it doesn't matter if the player can technically board the boat outside (if it's moved regardless of them buying a ticket) with the ticket they bought in the other town. We want to avoid adding extra messages if we don't have to. Is there a way we can set a flag or something to avoid having it take the player's money again, or should we just hope the player doesn't sabotage themselves and put the current implementation into both Bug Fix and Restored for v1.0b?