Battle Square Mechanics

[Kudistos Megistos]

This question was asked by someone else a while ago, but wasn't answered, so I'm asking it again in case anything new has been discovered.

What is known about the battle square mechanics? How, for example, could the handicaps be disabled? Is there any way to have three people in the battles instead of one? Or get Exp. and AP from fights?

[burnloungaz]

cant be done unless you reprogram the whole thing. the handicap conts as an event and a switch. when the first fight is done it clicks the handicap1 switch then when the handicap is set it sets the battle2 switch and so on.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Yeah, that's a pity. I changed the first byte of the opcode that causes this from 40 to 20; the battles took place in their normal location, the exp. etc. received screens came up and I was back in battle square after one fight.

It also seems that some of the information on the wiki is wrong. The opcode I changed to make this happen was 72 BTLMD, not 22 BTMD2.

Still, there should be some way to have all three members of the party fighting, shouldn't there? I'm going to try out a few more things today.

EDIT: I can get three members of the party into the battle arena fights by changing the bytes after the CA PRTYE opcode in the field file for the lobby of battle square (coloin1), but at the moment I am limited to using three specific characters rather than whichever three are in the party. I'm sure that if I spend enough time staring at numbers and reading the opcodes section of the wiki I'll be able to do this, or to disable the "select party member to fight" part all together. In the meantime, does anyone know whether one can put in variables to the effect of "whoever is the third member of the party" after the CA PRTYE opcode, or can one only put in character IDs 00-0B?

[burnloungaz]

nope you cant, cause once one char. dies the game triggers a switch to end the fight with out game over, and its real buggy.

[The Seer of Shadows]

This won't help you a lot, but if you put three Clouds in the party using Jenova, you can fight in the arena with all three of them, but only when you are forced to use Cloud (meaning when you enter the Battle Arena for the Keystone and when you do the special battle which is enabled after you get Omnislash and W-Summon).  There's no other easy way to cheat that I know of.

[Kudistos Megistos]

@burnloungaz

Hmm...I didn't actually try letting any of the characters be killed 

@Shadowseer

I don't know, that could help. And they are the places where it is most helpful to have extra characters; fighting the special battle in hardcore mode with only Cloud will be nigh on impossible.

[The Seer of Shadows]

I discovered this by accident lol.  I was using the Sephiroth patch and I was feeling hyper, so I made a party of Sephiroths to go through the game with.  Problem is that it sometimes freezes the game when you get to certain events.

The disadvantage to this is that if you change one of the characters' equipment, materia, etc., then the changes will be made to the other two (since they're all the same person).  This means that you have to charge into the arena with three Clouds with exactly the same equipment, materia, and stats.  So there are disadvantages, and if you ever find what you're looking for, it'll be far more effective just to change the way things work in the Battle Arena.

Alternatively, you could look for the enemies that are encountered in the battle arena (using Hojo) and make them weaker.  This won't affect your game too dramatically.  In fact, I believe that there are two Scenes with Proud Clod in it, one for the boss battle and one for the arena.  You could make the former reasonably difficult and the latter as easy as you like    And now that NFITC1 has released Heidegger, there are very few things about enemies that you can't edit without a hex editor.

I'm kinda stating the obvious, aren't I?

[Kudistos Megistos]

I think that the fights one has in the special battle are all in separate scene files from the fights one has with those enemies outside of the battle arena; maybe I could try editing them and editing the battle arena field file as well to see what happens if the fight does not have the 40h byte here.

But I'll still experiment with other things in the battle arena.

EDIT: I've found that a three member party can fight as normal in the battle arena without messing up the battle arena system. w00t. Now, getting all three members who are in the party at the time is a different matter entirely...