Blue mage class

I had an idea recently for a new custom class. As a final fantasy fan, I’ve always liked the blue mage who can learn spells from monsters after those monsters use their spells on him. There are a number of monster-only spells and attacks in FE8 like demon surge, etc. I know that those spells can be used by dark mages, but maybe the game could be hacked in such a way as to make these spells only accessible to the blue mage. Of course, for this to work, the monster weapons/spells would have to either be available to buy at the shop or available to capture off of enemies Thracia style. Maybe this type of magic could be called “Demon arts” or something. I really don’t know anything about rom hacking myself, so I don’t know how this could be implemented though. Does anyone here think this idea is practical?

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Definitely possible. I would do it by making all normal dark tomes locked to Shaman, Druids, etc, then give the Blue Mage unique access to monster spells. There’s a simple check-box that gives a character or class access to unique weapons, such as Myrmidons and Swordmaster being able to use the Shamshir, or Eirika being able to use the Rapier. There is also a patch for capturing, but it would allow capturing for every character AFAIK, so you would have to be cool with it as a core game mechanic.

Honestly it’s a pretty cool idea IMO, would be cool to see in a hack.

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I don’t think capturing would be necessary for what he wants if I’m understanding correctly. If he wants a specific unit to esentially “learn” a spell when facing monsters, you could just have a battle quote with each monster with no text. The battle quote can then set off a flag that triggers an event that gives the item to the character.

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I sorta did this in my main hack with skills instead of spells, but it was a fun little thing to do. Would be really cool to see other people try out a Blue Mage-type class! I’d absolutely love to see how other people would handle it.

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I’ll admit, I’m not an expert on using the available rom-hacking tools, but from what I’m familiar with:

-flagging a class to use monster weapons is easy to figure out, but you will want an animation tied to the class. In a perfect world, that would be the monster weapon itself (to that end, I would suggest some of the phenomenal summoner and dark magic using classes on the Repo), but you can just flag it as a spell animation as well

-capture would probably be the cleanest way to implement and explain the mechanic, though it would be possible to, say, event flag the map so if the Blue Mage enters tile X through Y or defeats enemy Z, an item will spawn, so there are a couple options

-unless you tie the weapons themselves to some kind of ranking like anima or dark magic, the most tricky part will be preventing the Blue Mage from leap frogging the intended curve by getting, for example, toxic fangs on par with a steel axe, or some manner of dark spell similar to what mogals and medusa use that are stronger then luna, or, worst case, easy access to accurate stone

-The most interesting part, for both sides, would be if monster weapons had additional roles, so the Blue Mage had more options to work with and monsters aren’t tied to weapons and offensive magic. A monster refresh, healing stave, or dancer ring would be a facinating way to shake up a monster heavy FE8 hack and make the Blue mage more then just a different flavor of dark mage

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I once had the idea that maybe there could be a monster healing spell that heals monsters but damages non-monsters. Maybe that would be impractical, but I agree that for there to be a new category of monster magic, there should be more monster spells that are different enough from the other types of magic

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In the hack called Queen’s Sword, which is not Blue Mage, there is a unit that can steal (learn) the boss’s skills when they fight the boss.
The implementation was to run an event in battle quote and copy the skills of that boss.

When the boss fights with that unit, you can learn the boss’s skills along with the dialogue.
However, there is a FE8NSkill limit and only one skill can be learned.
This means that if you fight another boss, you will overwrite the skill.

With FE8U SkillSystems, I think there is a little more range, but it would not be possible to learn an infinite number of skills.

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