Ever since I began this project I've grown to have a great deal more respect for how troublesome the design process could be. Granted, I am one fan and not a team of experienced developers, but I still feel the strain of keeping things within the purview of fellow fan expectations given that I plan on publishing this in one form or another. That being said, I have felt the need to make a number of questionable compromises that would give FF veterans pause, but rest assured I have not taken these liberties without a considerable amount of thought.
Liberty #1: The story takes place during the 1st cycle of the Dissidia war story-line. When the first Dissidia came out, the story implied that the war had cycled many times and that there were more heroes in previous cycles. Duodecim cemented this notion by adding more characters that were in the previous cycle of the conflict. It can be implied then that there was a large number of characters, maybe not even necessarily all combatants, the earlier you go. The problem with this is that the reports in the official games said that some of the characters were summoned more recently, so they weren't there in the earliest cycles? Well, whatever. The point of this game is to get EVERY character in there so that no one's favorite is left out. I figure this retcon will be forgiven once everyone is given what they really want.
Liberty #2: There's no exploratory world map. What I mean by "exploratory" is that there will be no wandering as JRPG gamers know it. I know that even Tactics games had a map that the player could at least point and click their destination too, but I'm simplifying it even further. I figure the game will have so much content that a map to roam would be just that much more cumbersome. In its place, there WILL be a map, but it will be more like a status screen to document the players progress: shaded areas is enemy territory and lightened areas is allied territory. Further more, when selecting a mission, a little indicating light will blink on the map for the players reference, but once the mission is accepted, the game immediately swooshes into the battle prep screen (along with a little airship diving in implying that the heroes traveled there that way). Once players get into the complexities of managing 100+ party members, they're likely to forget about the missing JRPG staple of map crawling.
Liberty #3: Characters from spin-offs and sequels will be added at the authors discretion. While I promise to include every character that was fully playable from the main series, that promise does not necessarily extend to certain NPCs (like the Turks in FFVII) sequel characters (Kytes, Filo, and Llyud from FFXII: Revenant Wings) or spin-offs (no Kingdom Hearts today). I will include a couple of specific characters in FFIV: the After Years and Paine from FFX-2. I even plan on having Benjamin from Mystic Quest as a New Game + unlockable joke. At best, there will be references to characters that are left out, but that will have to be addressed when the game is more fully written out.
Liberty #4: Revamped and simplified job system to accommodate the roster size. This is going to be the trickiest to do to every ones satisfaction. Once I embarked on this project, I knew that it needed to include a job system: what Tactics game doesn't? But it could not stay the way it was, not with a game of this ambitious scale. I will discuss this more in my next posting extensively, so let me hear comments from anywhere to let me know if these changes fall within acceptable parameters or if I've crossed some arbitrary line.