Final Fantasy V: FF5 Weapon Formula Tweaks

This is an ASM mod to weapon formulas in FF5.

It improves some weapon types that were so bad as to be basically unusable, such as bells and harps. It also allows some ability combinations that would have made sense but were disallowed due to combat formula limitations, mostly related to Magic Sword. It's intended to open up some options but not drastically change how FF5 plays, and doesn't nerf anything that's already good.

The thought process behind the changes was mostly with Four Job Fiesta runs in mind, but it works just as well for a normal playthrough.

Patch included IPS file to an unheadered FF5 rom. This doesn't use any space outside the normal confines of the FF5 weapon routines (and item data), so it should work on any translation or patch of SNES FF5 that doesn't mess with battles.

ASM Source is included.

Details are in the readme file, but some quick examples of things you can now do:

*Attack with Harps/Bells/Rods without being quite as sad
*Have daggers/whips/bows scale on Agility for fast classes
*Use Magic Sword with Equip Axe/Spear/Katana on M.Knight
*Use Magic Sword with the Rune Blade on M.Knight
*Use Magic Sword on Dragoon/Samurai without resorting to daggers
*Use Magic Sword on a Dancer with the Man Eater
*Jump with Doublehanded spears
*Use the Brave Blade without wishing you didn't just take the Chicken Knife
*Use the Drain Blade without being a Freelancer
*Drink Power Drinks for actual power


Version updates since 1.0:
Fixed bugs with Goblin Punch and Harp status effects, some other Harp tweaks

FF5 Weapon Formula Tweaks
by Mo
Modohhh@gmail.com
Mo#1976 on Discord
Modoh on Twitch

This is a mod to weapon formulas in FF5. It improves some weapon types that were so bad as to be basically unusable, such as bells and harps. It also allows some ability combinations that would have made sense but were disallowed due to combat formula (and space) limitations, mostly related to Magic Sword. It's intended to open up some options but not drastically change how FF5 plays, and doesn't nerf anything that's already good.

Patch IPS to an unheadered FF5 rom. This doesn't use any space outside the normal confines of the FF5 weapon routines (and item data), so it should work on any translation or version of SNES FF5 that doesn't mess with those.

Source is included. If you'd rather use the asm files instead of the IPS patch, apply all 3 to a clean unheadered rom with Asar to replicate what the IPS patch does. The Battle Power and Attack Types asm should work independently of each other. The Items asm needs the Attack Types asm applied or strange things will happen with Harps.


Details are later, but some quick examples of things you can now do:

Attack with Harps/Bells/Rods without being quite as sad
Have daggers/whips/bows scale on Agility for fast classes
Use Magic Sword with Equip Axe/Spear/Katana on M.Knight
Use Magic Sword with the Rune Blade on M.Knight
Use Magic Sword on Dragoon/Samurai without resorting to daggers
Use Magic Sword on a Dancer with the Man Eater
Jump with Doublehanded spears
Use the Brave Blade without being sad you didn't just take the Chicken Knife
Use the Drain Blade without being a Freelancer
Drink Power Drinks



Detailed changes:

Spear routines updated to allow Double Hand with Spears to work, including on Jump attacks.

Katana/Spear/Axe/Rune routines updated to allow Magic Sword effects to work.
Item data changes so that Katana/Spear/Axe show Magic Sword graphics and descriptions.
Note that Katanas can't crit while Magic Sword is active. This is actually in the the vanilla code, so Magic Sword working with them was intended at some point.

Brave Blade damage mult now increases with Vitality, though not by as much as the Chicken Knife does with Agi.
Vanilla: M = Str*LV/128 + 2
New: M = Str*LV/128 + Vit*LV/256 + 2

Drain Blade now has 66% chance to hit instead of 25%
Low enough that it's still a good combo with Aim/XFight to make it 100%
High enough that you can reasonably use it with a spellpower boosting ability without being a Freelancer to also bring Aim.

Daggers and other Agi weapons now scale with Agi. Vanilla they didn't due to a bug, but simply fixing it makes them super powerful like the Chicken Knife.
They now scale less per stat, but on both Str and Agi. Static M was increased to offset the loss to rounding this causes early on. Chicken Knife is unchanged.
This makes knives slightly weaker on non-agile classes like Knight and Berserker, but stronger on fast but weak classes like Thief.
Vanilla: M = Str*LV/128 + (bugged to be 0 or 1) + 2
New: M = Str*LV/256 + Agi*LV/256 + 3

Bells now deal 50-150% base damage instead of 50-100%. They also now ignore half of the target's magic defense. They still scale with Agi/Mag as before.
The Earth bell now uses the bell formula and has a 33% chance of casting Quake instead of 25%. Rune bell is unchanged (Str/Mag, MP crit and Def/4).
This may not be enough to make them usable often, but it's a 25% average damage boost at minimum, and halving MDef makes it much less likely to deal 0 damage.

Harps were changed as follows:
Silver Harp still deals "Gravity"/Percentage damage, but is now 25% current HP instead of 6%. This is so they can keep their small niche as gravity damage from vanilla.
Lamia/Dream Harps now deal standard damage using the (new) Bell formula. Status chance is now a fixed 75% instead of Magic hit% for tech reasons.
Apollo Harp is unchanged.

Rods now deal 100%-200% base damage instead of 0-200%. This should make them much less likely to do 0 damage, but still shouldn't obsolete level 1 damage spells.

Power Drinks now work. This is mostly important because other ASM patches for these would break things if patched on top of this.




Potential Future Ideas (and other ramblings):

Someday, Harps might work with X-Fight and other attack overrides, but my original implementation of this didn't work and was removed. It may return later.
The idea was to have them normally cast their Harp spells, but able to fall back to a normal damage formula instead of a null attack. This wouldn't have the Music note graphics but should still work.

Katana formula could pull element from the item's element strengthen bits to make the Air Lance Katana do Air damage.
Easy except there's not enough space without moving the Katana routine or the routines around it, or doing some jumps to other free space.

Could allow spellblade for all of the weapon types, but space is an issue for a lot of them since I can't reuse sword code as much..
For bows, could use the graphics for the elemental bows for appropriate spellblade effects which would be cool, but would probably need a bunch of space.
Probably won't do any of this, having some restrictions on it isn't a bad thing anyway.

I'd like to give Jump a small bonus with non-spear weapon types, but would be difficult to fit the extra code in for most of them.

I'd like to implement the SwdSlap ability (the Samurai Paralyze attack that currently does nothing special).
Maybe make it convert the attack to the Bow+Status weapon type. This would also change the stats that the attack scales with which is kind of neat.
Would need to figure out a good way to do so and a good chunk of space for the routine, since right now it's basically one instruction jumping elsewhere.

Make Aqua Rake deal Water damage? This would let you use it on Water weak foes that aren't Desert based.
No desert foes are immune/absorb to water, and the ones that are weak to it are low HP and die to one Aqua Rake anyway, so no real downsides.

Could make Berserkers pull from equipped commands randomly, Umaro style. More advanced than anything else done here and a bit outside weapon formulas, but would be fun. Probably needs too much space.

To allow for the some of the above:
Could pull in a bunch more code/data into my asm files, like the tables of commands and attack routines. If every direct reference/jump to the code has a proper label,
it would allow rearranging the routines and consolidating the free space for new ones.
With this space, there could be a generalized attack routine that takes a list of parameters to apply to allow a lot more flexibility.
It's also both a lot of work and prone to crashing things hard if mistakes are made.


Other romhacks hacks by me:
FF3 Fiesta Mod
Adjusts FF3 so that it's much more reasonable to do runs with 4 random classes from the start, in the style of the FF5 Four Job Fiesta.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6334/


Database match: Final Fantasy V (Japan)
Database: No-Intro: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20210222-050638)
File/ROM SHA-1: E937B54FFF99838E2E853697E4F559359AA91FD6
File/ROM CRC32: C1BC267D