TF7 - The Final Fantasy 7 Rebalancing Mod

[Tonfa]

Well, this has been ready for release for a while now and I've agonized over making a beautiful, perfect introduction post for it for days so instead just enjoy the game for now and the proper pleasantries later !!

Patch 1.00 - 8/26/2016

Download the TF7 patches for all three discs here. This is for the PSX version of the game. You'll need a fresh ISO, the patch can be applied with PPF-O-Matic.

PCs, skillsets, equipment are much more distinct. Click for a large overview of the changes!

Enemies fight back but won't force you to grind to level 99 in Reactor 1.

Thanks to Laggy for being the co-author, Qhimm forums for the tools, and any testers and all you cool people.

[Laggy]

[13:03] <Laggy> not advocating grinding to 99 in reactor 1 0/10 trash mod

[Grefter]

[jsh357]

Man, and I just started a replay of this a week ago. To restart or not to restart...

[Dark Holy Elf]

Posting to say that I am definitely psyched about this and will certainly get around to playing it when I have time. Congrats, Tonfa!

[Tide]

Aw, I don't get any special mentions ? RIP.

On the plus side, everyone can now see the mighty power of SCOTCH. RICHARD about to claim more souls than a Valkyrie Profile game.

[Lord Ephraim]

Does this hack include enemies using instant death if you try to cheese them?  Sorry Super Laggy RPG flashbacks.

Since you're using the Psone base, This guy are sick line is left alone right?

[Laggy]

Does this hack include enemies using instant death if you try to cheese them?  Sorry Super Laggy RPG flashbacks.

my main contribution was enemy design so rip u eph

And yes it uses the PS1 lines since it's a PS1 ISO patch.

[Reiska]

Are the enemies in the train tunnel supposed to hit this hard?  Like, they're just shy of OHKOing Tifa...

EDIT: yeah, and Rocket Launcher comes like 10 HP shy of OHKOing Cloud.  seriously, wtf.  It feels like an accidental out-of-depth situation, since the enemies in the actual reactor after them hit much less hard. >_>  Also Airbuster was really nicely tuned, props on that fight.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I am playing this. PSX emulation remains more annoying in 2017 than SNES emulation was 15 years ago; this is confusing.

Despite that I am having fun, which I wasn't sure if I would because I replayed FF7 somewhat recently and I figured that'd tide me over for a while.

Reactor 1: I died in the prologue because I got berserked by a motor drive when my HP was somewhat lowish. Mm you should probably throw in a save point if you're gonna do that. Or just remove this monster from the pre-Barret areas.

I reset against Guard Scorpion because Ethers become bad when used in battle. I figured "restores 100 MP / 25% MP" would mean "whichever is better", whoops. I still won but one of my PCs died and that annoyed me. Refight went cleanly, obviously much tougher than original GS but very fair for a first boss.

The differing item functionality based on where they're used is kinda odd design-wise. Not sure if it's good or bad, would have to play more.

I didn't have problems with the reactor tunnel that Reiska did but I also got into exactly one encounter and it wasn't the one he saw apparently. Oh FF7 and your incredibly short areas. Proto Machineguns in the reactor itself were nasty, though; they really wear you down. And I even wasted a MT poison on them. Back-row Barret ended up turtling with potions and OHKOing each of them in turn with a limit, kinda silly. (I then reset when I realise that FF7 doesn't revive between battles and PDowns are too valuable right now.) Airbuster was pretty fun; not too hard but I've always liked using back hits against him.

Cloud's physical game (including poor row-subject Braver) feels kinda weak early; I think I ran up against slash-resistant enemies at bad times. Failing to OHKO a Motor Drive stands out as memorably weaksauce. I guess the other two PCs have more fighter-ish builds so that's part of it; obviously he is fine at magic still. omg Cloud isn't OP any more, 0/10 game Tonfa.

HELL HOUSE did over 80% to front-row Cloud with Hell Bomber, yikes. Back row Aeris solos. After that I just put Cloud in the back since magic works perfectly fine here. Also man, Hell Houses give great rewards, loads of gil and a Hi-Potion. Gil is actually pretty tight early in FF7 now that I actually care about what I buy and wanted to make sure I was well-stocked on items! Haven't even bought any materia yet. Thanks for putting initial Fire on Aeris, good call.

I definitely like the greater PC stat/equipment variety! Stronger enemies are good too of course.

About to fight Scotch; RIP me.

[Random Consonant]

The more the merrier I guess.

Reactor 1: I too got berserked but it wasn't at low HP so nothing came of it.  I kind of WTF'd at laser randoms for a bit but RICHARD informed me it was unannounced cHP damage so ok that's fine.

Guard Scorpion: I also blew an ether here mid-fight but no one died during the fight or the escape so everything went fine despite Cloud running out of MP because his physical is awful and not helped by my coming to the conclusion that leaving him in front row would be a spectacularly poor decision right now.

Reactor Tunnel: hey guize i found the rocket launchers and yes they actually can hurt that hard when they hit, though they whiff a fair amount and the high, high 2HKO to front row apparently is inconsistant?  We managed to avoid drowning though.  Blugus are also kind of annoying with Hell Bubbles inflicting sleep and being vaguely chufty but it's a short area.

Reactor 5: Again I blow through more MP than I probably had to and use all my ethers because I'm a huge dummy and go through a dungeon that is basically copypasted in a stupid manner.  Will this continue to become a thing?  Who knows.  Nothing particularly overwhelming here (okay machine guns are MT which could be bad if you left 2/3rds of the party in the front row since that damage adds up), I just went about doing things like an idiot.  Tifa continues to prove comparatively glassy due to needing to basically needing to be in front right now but not to the point of causing Problems.

Air Buster (1 reset): hey guize i dun remember what this does *manages to completely mishandle the fight, wipes* oh okay maybe don't -blindly- angle for back hits and rely on your one PD to bail you out this time.  Then I end up having to use my one PD anyways because action delay meant I couldn't potion Cloud in time or something, w/e nothing unrecoverable and the fight was otherwise fine.

That bit before trying to Cloud a pretty lady: oh aeris comes with a free fire materia, rip 600 gil.  I dick around with a Hell House for the sake of poor life decisions SCIENCE poor life decisions oh they can do MP damage and i blew through all my ethers like an idiot welp better hope i don't run into any more of those and surprisingly I don't.

time to make cloud pretty or fail and fight scotch in the attempt i guess

[Laggy]

Just FYI we really avoided adding physical resistances for the most part, only weaknesses. Cloud's physical game is legit kinda weak early on (but yes you are comparing him to two physical chars until Aeris).

In practice, during my playthroughs, I felt like you kept Cloud up if you wanted to make use of his limits and could deal with the extra damage coming in (this lends itself to being more efficient at times, especially once you get Cross-slash), or you could keep him back and just make him a dedicated mage early on, which is safer but more MP intensive. (Use Potions to heal OOB of course.) He gets a wider variety of weapons that'll let him emphasize physicals more as the game goes on, as well as FF7 being just naturally backloaded for physical setups outside of limits.

Item differences in and out of battle was a genius idea on Richard's part IMO. It may not be intuitive but it strongly reins in action economy effectiveness of using Items, which yeah you may never have cared in vanilla FF7 but they're actually quite incredibly good if left at their original values.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that the 5 minute reactor escape is great; it's actually tense instead of the joke it is in FF7o. I assume it's not much of an issue if you just run from everything, but still.

Scotch - I have back row mage Cloud and Scotch is certainly respectable but I win without too many issues.

Aps - Hey he's pretty fun, tsunami healing him turns it from a joke move into something that does serious pressure, POIZN adds up slowly and confuse can definitely be an unwanted complication, especially the time it hits Cloud right as he's casting Cure. Aeris' fire does its job well here, as do Tifa's rather nasty limits. Making them row-subject is a bit of a nerf in randoms (though the higher power makes up for it some) but yeah bosses no like.

I don't have too much to say about the sewers or train graveyard; enemies break out some new statuses (frog and mini) so that's fun. Ghosts are rather pathetic once you get on top of them but they certainly annoy before that, Deenglows are a good source of ethers (yes, I am stealing because this area isn't too hard and I respect the potential of needing these things later more than I would in FF7) and surprisingly tough to kill with magic due to multiple resistances. Generally Aeris' fire and Tifa's physicals/limits clean up pretty well as Cloud largely spams steal outside the odd timely Cross-Slash.

I get into one fight on the stairwell, it is easy. Makes that Jessie save point feel pointless! But then Reno is quite tough so it's appreciated.

Reno - Man, Slow-Numb. Can you even heal that at this point? Yikes. Pyramids taking 2-3 hits to take down totally changes the action economy of the move and it's now nasty even when you know what you're doing, and in general he throws out lots of status and pretty good damage. Back row is good protection from most of it but you can't get cocky about it due to Pyramid. I win first try but that's with one PC under pyramid (which fortunately does not deny exp/AP) and one person near the slow-numb countdown, so kinda close!

Hell House Redux - Oh there's the MP move Random was talking about, oh look MT blind + ... I guess that's what "Dual" is? RIP me, I escape with only Barret alive. Fear the Hell House.

Next up: climbing a shiny wire of hope

[Laggy]

You can steal Softs from the copter shinra dudes on the staircase if you need them for Reno. Obviously not mandatory as you saw, but yes.

[Grefter]

Is it the time to start talking about how legit genius split item functionality is again?  Because yes.   Potion/Ether working differently in battle and their functionality being flipped is hands down the best bit of design in TF7 in my opinion.  It shift things up a ton in functionality like even as soon as you leave Midgard because if FF7 scaling and makes Potions and their ilk always relevant.  Triage is a bit more of a thing in TF7 and watching tide bust out Potion late disc 1 was one of the more glorious bits of early testing.  It wasn't as good as "something useless like an echo screen" but it was pretty good.

[Random Consonant]

Oh yeah I for one am finding the split functionality on healing items cool and good.

Scotch - so I failed at remembering how to make Cloud ~the prettiest~ and had to fight Scotch of the machine gun double act.  Fortunately I learned from Tied getting rekt by Scotch and do things that don't get me wrecked by Scotch.

Aps - uh comet2 death counter, rip cloud.  Front row continues to be rather dangerous here as Tifa is pretty close to being 2HKO'd, but at least it's not a waste and hey i feel at least somewhat vindicated by my waste of 600 gil on a reduntant fire materia.  I fought some sewer randoms but nothing that did anything notable.

Train Graveyard - Cloud manages to be somewhat successful at stealing ethers from deenglows, this will surely be important later.

Stairwell/Reno - oh hey i remember seeing reno apply slow-numb in this, better steal softs i guess.  Against Reno, Barret keeps getting stuck in the pyramid and between trying to juggle that, getting paralyzed-3HKO'd and the threat of SLOW-NUMB i nearly get wrecked but pull through anyways barely.

Shinra HQ - Fought the Sample-thingy, used the cauldron I got somewhere against it for sleep because four targets = a fair amount of pressure and it kills your MP and things Mini you, this works and we manage to avoid drowning yet again.  Then I get wrecked by a warning board with a laser turret that does like ~500 + paralysis and then a machine gun finished me off, wipe count: 2.  Moth Slicer ID blindsided me, little concerned about them in an already-harsh mob but there's readily available save points there so not a huge deal there.  (Laggy tells me the ID is 4% so pretty much openly bad luck on my part since I wasn't farming them for Carbon Bangles)

~Escape~ -
myself before doing this: nah not gonna bother switching materia for the elevator fight, how bad could it be
myself during the elevator fight: rip all my phoenix downs
sooo yeah Aeris and Barret end up getting hit with Doom, die to timer running out, then Barret ends up dying something like three or four times again while I try to play damage control.  Also burn through something useless like an echo screen twice because wave cannon shuts down 2/3rds my offense there.

Rufus turns out to be Scotch redux, only he starts off with less damage but has his cat thing buddy to pick up the slack while he laughs a bunch which evidently buffs his damage up to nearly triple at which point he becomes a faster Scotch that doesn't doubleact but crits more and can't be paralyzed by Cross Slash.  Also strangly tanky to magic to the point where even back row physicals were better (Laggy tells me he's slash weak, which is fair enough).  Would've gone better if I hadn't realized too late that using Deadly Wastes would speed up the fight a bit by getting rid of Dark Nation faster but oh well.

Motor Ball uses Reflect but past that it's pretty tame, which considering I was apparently in full scrubathon mode for the previous fights -and- RIDGE RACER I am fairly thankful for.

I then sell off the three accessories I got and a gun that no one can use because i'm poor and need the 7500 gil.  Time to catch a chocobo I guess.

[Tonfa]

we manage to avoid drowning yet again.  Then I get wrecked by a warning board

IT WARNED YOU

[Random Consonant]

Facerolling into all the bads continues.  RICHARDnomics proves inescapable.

Mythril Cave - two of the three randoms I run into here involve Ark Dragons, which deal ~400 with Sacred Fire, 2HKOing people not named Barret, and they have ~friends~.  Oh well at least I get the thing learned off of them.

I decide to acquire an annoying ninja at this point because I dunno, maybe I want a source of MT healing that isn't tied to 1) a temp or 2) a currently OPB use of my one Recover materia. This involved a fair amount of running and resetting because while not -particularly- lethal the randoms take more effort than I would like to consistantly fight for the length of time required.

Bottomswell (1 reset) - weak to all physicals and starts regenerating if hit with magic okay sure game wait is that mini aaaaaaa and then I reset because I didn't have anything that could cure Mini on hand.  Oops.  Nothing too bad, just got rekt by not having something useless like a cornucopia.  I come back to this with 20 and am probably going to regret doing that.

Jenova BIRTH (1 reset) - So we have a triple-act laser that does ~190 front/~95 back (2/3HKO if it focus fires but usually doesn't), Tail Laser for 240ish(? might be misremembering) MT, Stop, and Freeze, which is a 2HKO to anyone (though one person on my team can halve it thanks to Elemental) + Stop, and sometimes used with Aspil (so rip someone's MP).  First attempt at this goes poorly, Cloud and Tifa both get stopped (stop followed directly after by freeze), Aeris gets gunned down with a mostly full limit bar, and attempts at recovery fail.

Well then.  Second time this doesn't happen, though Tifa spends half the battle as a popsicle anyways.

Mt. Corel - Comparatively a breather, though Spiky Hell and its fixed 400 damage is a thing and I burn through my remaining ethers not having to put up with it more than I have to because summons are big MP hogs.  Bombs are dicks though.  At least ethers are buyable now just as soon as, y'know, I stop being poor.

Gold Saucer - I am too poor for minigames, RICHARDnomics continues to hold me firmly in its grasp.  Prison randoms are mostly too annoying to fight but I do end up picking Matra Magic and Laser off from a pair of Death Claws.

Dyne - okay let's see how this goes uh crap barret does like no damage shooting him what else do i have on him oh E. Skill, E. Skill has to be better right. *Sacred Fire* *lol instakill* Welp.  Didn't know that was a thing but sure I'll take it.

Chocobo Racing - remove chocobo racing

[Random Consonant]

Gongara (1 reset) - oh hi turks how are you ok sure let's fight and I try to fight it normally and nope, reset.  Second time I remember I'm playing a FF game and start poking for holes oh hi Sleep sure glad you're here.  Then I get back attacked by some dino tank thing sometime later but don't wipe to it.

Cosmo Canyon - I liked Garan's pillow better.  Also poverty continues.

Cave of the Gi - Well this isn't too bad apart from having to back out after entering because I forgot to buy more Phoenix Downs, though 4x/5x Weg or w/e formations are kind of annoying if they don't get one-shotted with Ice2 or Shiva.  Also yay AP gains, yay save prompting after clearing the spider webs.

Gi Nattak (1 reset) - Ah... slownumb + haste + silence.  I kind of bungle handling the recovery getting a feel for the fight and end up getting prodded to death.  Second time goes more smoothly.

Nibelheim - Some weirdo gave me a Mind Source despite the claim that all Sources were replaced with other consumeables?

Shinra Mansion - I end up fighting more randoms here than I'd like because I don't remember the safe combination and didn't want to spend time looking it up on the internet, though it does end up with two mastered Sense materia that I hock for cash so I can stop being poor.

Lost Number (1 reset) - ok this isn't so bad i won--oh he formchanged and is physicaling me aaaa stop berserking people please also stop critting for that matter oh everyone died.  Second time I remember to 1) put Tifa in the back so she doesn't die to the physical form and 2) look through what I have that might be useful oh I have a couple Spider Webs sure let's use one nothing else seems to be working and then it's mostly a matter of pounding him with spells until he dies.  Then I pick up some dumb edgelord.

Next time, drinking some goddamn tea.

[Laggy]

lost number magic form is much cooler but everyone is too afraid to use physicals

[Grefter]

Maybe you should have left in some effective physical strats Mister Lag"Nerf Atomic Scissors and Power Soul"gy

[Random Consonant]

And for the record I had neither of those things.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Shinra Building. I actually get the Domino quiz on my first try, yay me. Randoms make me stay awake now which is nice, though I don't have too much to say about them. They're in a pretty good place overall. I win my one and only fight with a Warning Board but yeah they are rude.


H0512 - I have a fair bit of trouble with this one for whatever reason. 2 resets? Lots of enemies acting can make things tricky, the MP damage at the start of the fight makes that a real issue too. Star Pendant is useful here at least. I go for poison-all to take out the minions a bit faster. Steal has a pretty cool role in this fight, which is neat.


Hundred Gunner can go jump off a cliff out of a broken elevator shaft. Seriously, first design of this game that just pissed me off. First off, he nulls lightning because... fuck you, I guess? I mean he already immunes short-range physicals and poison, let's just pile on something else there while raising a middle finger to FF7 fans who think they were preparing for this fight? I ended up with a Red XIII who couldn't do anything but heal (or use my 1 grenade I guess). And then he uses MT death sentence when I was almost out of PDowns and... you can't go back and buy more if you saved after H0512? (Didn't want to go try to find steals.) C'mon. Every other boss you can usually avoid deaths if you're careful and play it right.

Aside from that he and Heli Gunner are pretty easy overall, not much to say. I win on my second try; it helps that MT death sentence only actually procs on one PC this time.


Rufus is cool though! Man that's a lot of pressure early on, I'm pretty much heal-locked. Fortunately I use the cheaty strategy of Magic Counter Cure which is a godsend in a solo fight. Eventually I prevail and send Dark Nation packing, at which point I'm low on MP and by now Rufus has buffed his damage to be kinda scary (especially on crits), so back-row physicals slowly get the job done, with a lot of healing.

One Restore max definitely looks justified now, since as is Magic Counter-Cure will have to compete with Cure-All.

Motor Ball has reflect which is rude, but out of pure chance it happens that Cloud has both Bio and the Star Pendant, so he can bounce spells off Motor Ball harmlessly to test for reflect wearing off. Once that happens the ice/bolt blitz takes him out, along with a few Tifa limits. This fight also makes me feel like a pro for setting Elemental-Fire. Otherwise Motor Ball isn't too much of an issue, which is good because no save point after the race.

Off to Kalm we go~

[Tonfa]

Maybe you should have left in some effective physical strats Mister Lag"Nerf Atomic Scissors and Power Soul"gy

Look Laggy might be the fall guy but please direct all dunking on PC changes to me

Good catch on the source, will roll a fix to that and Dyne in the next patch

[Grefter]

Is 100% jokes with regards to Power Soul, tide was doing like damage cap on disc 1?  That was too bonkers, but I would love it if there is an magic balance point that keeps it a relevant strat (I don't think there is without a clone of the weapon scales up).

Atomic Scissors is also mostly just, but it kind of opened up a space for Barret early disc 1 that he normally couldn't fill but I don't even remember what it was that was wonky.  Too much attack power and it might have ignored row?