Howdy! I read through this forum and I didn't see this question addressed specifically (but there's also a good chance I missed it despite my best efforts, so commence with mockery at your leisure!):
As indicated in the Party Mechanics FAQ by TFergusson, five of the six primary statistics has a sort of "grade" used to indicate the relative growth of each statistics for each character (under section 1.4 of that FAQ). This was (I assume) the original programmers' way of trying to make some characters better at some statistics than others (although ultimately most are interchangeable with the right set up).
As part of a personal enforced class challenge, I wanted to lower the starting stats of some characters in statistics they might normally be considered weak; that's easy to do in BC, of course; but I noticed that if I used BC to level those characters (to see where the stats would go upon leveling), the statistics "normalized" themselves back into the typical range found in the vanilla game; lowering the characters back down put their starting stats in the ballpark of where they usually start. I know that's a little wordy, so here's an example:
Set Cloud to L1, set SPR to 1.
Use the "Status Info" tab to level Cloud to L99, his SPR manages nonetheless to grow to 97. (I know it won't always grow to exactly 97, but it will be in the ballpark.)
Reduce Cloud's level to L1 again, and his SPR falls only to 11 (again, it won't always fall to exactly 11 under this process, but it'll be in the ballpark.)
So! To my question: is this just a function of BC using the stat grades to simulate leveling (but in-game, Cloud's SPR in this example would be lower than usual), or will FF7 itself correct Cloud's initially low SPR according to its stat grade as he levels? I assume the latter, but will test with an emulator and uber-XP codes in a bit.
I suspect that if I'm willing to get my hands dirty, I could tweak an appropriate game file to adjust each character's stat grade to allow for better diversity in stat growth, in conjunction with initial stat tweaks. But my question is this: does BC support this sort of thing and I just missed it somehow, or is there a way to introduce "negative" sources? I can dive into using the Wall Market kernel.bin editor, but I wanted to check here before I tried that and was subsequently defeated by the technology.
Cheers!
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