FF9 GUARDIANS OF TERRA AND WHOLE TEAM VS NECRON MOD/HACK

[Linkerang]

Hey guys  , with the premise I'm terrible at modding/hacking, did you ever wonder how would the other 3 boss fights against the Guardians of Terra in disc 3 would have been? I mean, yeah, you fight them later on, but they're trasformed, and you fight them with pretty much all your group. It'd be cool if someone gets to actually develop those 3 offscreen boss fights (you only face the Earth Guardian with Zidane and eventually Quina), with all the right team divisions (Freya and Amarant VS the Fire Guardian, Steiner and Vivi VS the Wind Guardian, and Garnet, Eiko and eventually, in the case of Alternate Fantasy, Beatrix VS the Water Guardian). I think it'd be interesting to see how someone would approach those boss fights with the available characters. Also, despite being completely random in the bigger picture, I like the final boss fight against Necron, but I was disappointed to see that, unlike all the previous entries in the series, the final boss didn't involve every playable character in the game. I think it'd be really cool, maybe through a team-switching mechanic, like in the Bizarro Sephiroth battle in FF7, or by replacing the KO'ed characters with random ones after a few turns where they don't get revived (pretty much like in the FF6 and FF8 final bosses) for example. What do you think? Would you be interested? Also, there's anyone who would be up to do something like that?

[Tirlititi]

Here's what I wrote about it some time ago:

The biggest issue is that there is no battle models for these guardians. As you may have noticed, the Earth Guardian and the Lich are slightly different and so are the other ones:
- You can see the Fire Guardian in a cutscene: she is much more human-looking than Maliris and has very long hairs instead of a long snake body,
- You can also see the Wind Guardian: he has only one head instead of the three heads of Tiamat,
- There is no 3D model of the Water Guardian, only a concept art exists to my knowledge (you can see it on the Final Fantasy Wikia, on the Kraken's page). Again, slight differences.

One could try to use the non-battle models in battle. That is possible with some work but it would require animating them properly (and give at least a sword to the Fire Guardian, I guess). But for the Water Guardian, everything's to do.

The Water Guardian battle could also easily get unbalanced.

Or one could just not care about these details and go for using the Memoria models. That would be much easier (and it is feasible with the current modding tools).

I tried hard to make the importation of new 3D models in the game's archive possible and failed miserably (it is possible to replace existing models with a lot of care, but not to add new ones). I guess the way to try it would be to edit the game's engine to allow it to use non-archived (and non-serialized) 3D models.

With the latest update of Memoria, it is possible to add brand new animations without replacing existing ones, and in a format that is way more accessible than the binary format natively used by the game (Unity's serialized animation format). With some animating work and a bit of work in Hades Workshop for their attacks / AI, it would be possible to have battles against the Fire and Wind guardians that look great (one can even give an existing sword model to the Fire guardian with the use of a dummy sword enemy that can't be targeted and that is attached to her the same way Vivi and Garnet are attached to Prison Cage). The Water guardian is still out of range if one wants to use a model really different from the one fought in Memoria.

By the way, when thinking of what it may look like, I imagined the Fire guardian holding a sword in one hand and a whip in the other. Unfortunatly, FF9's battle system is not really suited for animating combos that move the target all other the place (like what they did in Legend of Dragoon).

[Linkerang]

Man, it's an honor talk with you again. Your AF Mod has been featured in a lot of publications everywhere, even here in Italy!!! I personally consider it the ultimate way to play the game, Beatrix is integrated so DAMN well into everything. I hope SE will make it official one day. Yeah, I must say that, since the first time I posted here 3 years ago, FF9 tools really evolved, this gives me hope. As for the Water Guardian, yeah, the fact the 3D model is missing may be a problem, which eventually could asserted through the use of its official artworks, or, by the very least, by slightly modifying and shrinking the Kraken model. If I may ask, do you think times are mature for the afromentioned feats to be implemented into the game? And do you know anyone who could help me with this? Also, I must say it saddens me the fact you retired from modding. I think that if there was a person which could have given FF9 its ultimate incarnation, that would be you, you already did so much

[Tirlititi]

Thanks a bunch for your kind words
I personnally think that trying to implement these fights are worth the effort, except that the Water Guardian should be done with its Memoria model because it would barely be worth to create a custom model for him even if it were easy to import it in the game. I've seen a couple of people making really good stuff on FF9, a couple of them are still working on it. But as always, people usually mod for their own entertainment/achievement first (which is the finest way to do it IMO), so you can't really tell if they are interested in creating these battles beforehand.

Also, I forgot to answer about the full party VS Necron part.
1) Having 8 (or 9) characters at the same time would technically be possible on a special fight but extremely tedious to implement,
2) Having a Bizarro Sephiroth-like fight would be more accessible, although still hard to implement,
3) Having an Ultimecia-like fight should be pretty straightforward to implement.
In each case however, it's about adding features to Memoria's C# source code so that requires coding skills.

I'm not at all planning to do it but if someone goes for it, I can provide knowledge on where to find the parts to modify and some kind of roadmap.

[Linkerang]

Really hope for that man. That's been pretty much my dream for years.