The three-battle playtest batch. Every entry traces to Joe's logs from the first beta night — two humans, quickmatch with AI fill, three games.

The match can no longer start without you. Battle 1 opened rounds deep — units off their spawns, a first turn burned on the clock — because the pre-battle hold armed at the first client's auth, leaving the whole connect window free-running under the AI fallback. The hold now arms the moment the match is created, each arriving client extends it to get a full study window (bounded by a hard cap), and it releases only when every HUMAN seat has closed its ceremony — connected or still loading.
Bots take their turns like people. Online AI turns resolved whole inside one 100ms tick, so an all-AI round hit the board as a pile-up. Each bot now plays one command per beat (~0.8s): walk, breathe, strike, yield.
A refused command spends nothing. The reject toast has promised "(Action not spent.)" since v0.5.15 while both the server and the offline client burned the slot anyway — an out-of-stock click cost the whole turn. Rejections now hand the slot (and your undo point) back, on both sides of the wire. AI attempts still spend, which is what keeps a confused bot from re-proposing the same refusal forever.
Out-of-stock is visibly dead. Consumable charges never updated online (the count only arrived with the login snapshot), so a spent Shuriken stayed lit. The tally now tracks every use live, the row greys with the same SPENT tag offline play always had, and hotkeys can't slip past the grey.
The ninja actually dual-wields. The innate rolled two blades and swung one: the second-strike gate read the support slot instead of the slot-or-innate predicate. Every remaining direct slot read (Concentrate, Unbreakable) got the same rerouting.
Twin blades pay for the pair — ×0.6 per hand. Two full-power swings measured too strong; a dual-wield Attack now totals 1.2× a lone weapon — remembering the pair ALSO carries the second rolled weapon's full +stat lines — and both the battle log and the hover forecast carry the new "twin blades" factor so the light swings explain themselves.
Throw Items finally reaches. The engine has honoured the chemist's innate 3-tile throw since it shipped; the targeting highlight never learned it, so Ember Plume painted one tile and the innate was invisible. The highlight now mirrors the engine's reach rule, innates included.
A summon spares its summoner. Battle 3's AI Eidolon Caller KO'd itself with its own Cyclops after the cast lock-on dragged the blast home. Every ability in the summoner's catalog now steps its caster out of the blast — allies in the circle still burn, and the AI knows the difference.
The Jump roll is on the card. The rolled Jump range now rides the gear ceremony as its own rarity-tinted line (Jump 3 common … Jump 6 ultimate), and the results hover and Discord roll card inherit it.
Move +1 belongs to the squire. The chemist, knight and monk carried identical copies; they're gone.
The R/S/M dedup pass (Joe's assignments). Movements 26 → 15: one Teleport (the mage's), one Levitate (the healer's), one +2 Jump (the archer's), and every flavour "+1 MOV" row deleted. Reactions 27 → 24: Earth Embrace, Lance Riposte and Vanish Strike are gone; Iron Will moved from the squire (who held two counters) to the knight. The five block-physical reactions all dropped 10 points — Parry 30%, Evade 35%, Blade Grasp 45%, Third Eye 35%, Finger Guard 30% — a block is a coin flip on whether the next hit lands, and the coin got fairer.
Heal-when-struck fires on HEART. Auto-Potion, Regenerate and Encore now trigger at the bearer's Brave instead of an authored number (they were 45/50/30) — FFT's own reaction rule, applied to the family where nerve is the point. The Codex and the website say "triggers at your Brave" instead of printing the dead number.
Quality of screen life: the game-over column fits the viewport again (RETURN TO MENU was pushed clean off by the spoils block); the dual-wield swing animates twice; the chat box minimizes to its header strip and glows when a message lands while shrunk; FACE WHICH WAY? carries a live compass rose that stays true as the camera turns; and the battlefield beds moved to their own Ambient dial (default 30%) and now rest 30–45s between passes — the forest bird no longer chirps the entire match.

Verdict